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How to do research on a company?

How can an undergraduate in Computer Science decide if he should join a software company or go into research?

  • Please provide details about what problems you work on if you are in a software company or in research

  • Answer:

    Although there are software engineering jobs that are close to research, I think there are fundamental differences between software engineering and research (specially research performed in an academical environment). I'll try to express my opinion based on my experience as both a software engineer and researcher (PhD student): What makes software engineering and research different Software engineering is mainly about solving today's problems. It implies that a pragmatic component must be present in the character of every software engineer. You must love building products. Do you love taking software projects from the beginning, develop them to completion and polish details until you have a great final product? Pragmatism comes hand in hand with practical skills. In order to build products for today's necessities, a software engineer must like to keep himself/herself up-to-date with diverse technologies like computer languages, frameworks, software methodologies... For example, a software engineer is passionate about discussing when to use test-driven development or when to apply the null object pattern on a software design; a researcher, not so much. On the other hand, research is about solving tomorrow's problems. When you do research you typically focus on a very concrete problem and work on it until you get results that push the current knowledge forward. Note that this was not a requirement for a software engineer. A software engineer is usually solving problems that are flexible enough that a solution is, at least, visible (more or less elegant, but visible). In the case of a researcher, a solution is not obvious (otherwise it wouldn't be research) and you have to show great persistence and try many paths until you get something valuable to publish as a paper. A researcher must also have a higher than average component of rigor. If you do research in parts of Computer Science that are close to mathematics (like algorithms), you have to have even more rigor. You like to be constantly in the mood of proving why your ideas work or why they are better than the ones of your fellow researchers. Did you enjoy discrete mathematics proofs during your undergraduate studies, for example? Of course, a software engineer must also be rigorous, but at a different level (often imprecise natural language is enough). In some extreme situations (or not that extreme, depending on the company), rigor in engineering is replaced by pragmatism (getting things done). What makes software engineering and research similar Both disciplines require a lot of reading. Software engineers read a lot of code, documentation and books during their working day. Researchers read current literature constantly. In both disciplines you have to have good abstraction skills. Abstraction is key to good software engineering. It is the amplification of the essential and the elimination of the irrelevant. As a software engineer you will spend the day working at different abstraction levels: One day you'll work on the interactions between systems, another day on the behavior of individual modules, or maybe implementing functions. A researcher uses abstraction to dissect problems and build approaches to solve them.

Daniel Martín at Quora Visit the source

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If money is not an issue I recommend PhD studies to everyone.  This is because it's easy to go from a PhD program to industry, but harder to go the other way.  At every career fair companies will try to poach you from your PhD program. I especially recommend PhD studies if you're mathematically inclined, or if you like coming up with new algorithms instead of just implementing them.  Most of my projects in grad school have involved designing new algorithms or creatively applying existing algorithms to new problems.

Anonymous

There's only way one to know for sure, do both and see which one makes more sense for your long term interests. As an undergraduate in CS, you can spend every summer full-time and (part-time during the semesters) doing internships at software companies and doing research with CS professors at your university (or other universities through a SURF / REU). People in software companies usually work on products, the problems are much less theoretical and much more product oriented. People in research often do more theoretical work even though there are opportunities to work on things that can be used in products down the road.

Anonymous

First clarify what factors matter to you most? The joy of research? The money? What motivates you? Many software company jobs involve research, so you could avoid or at least postpone the decision.

Andrew Heenan

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