10 Positive Feedbacks for Every Constructive Criticism - How I Learned to Love Uber - Part I

I usually tell people that I spent about three years preparing to transition from academia to industry. It's popular to do a "Why I Gave Up on the Academic Dream and Transitioned to Industry" type blog post. But for me, honestly the right title would be "Why I Stayed in Academia About Five Years Longer than I Really Intended".

Culturally I am not the best fit for academia, as someone who is very interested in financial things like the stock market and cynical about the idea of working for the "common good". I got into academia for vaguely to certifiably insane reasons (like wanting to understand QED and being interested in crackpot theoretical ideas), and once I felt like I had the knowledge I wanted, I was ready to leave. The story of how I got caught up in the cult of academia and became a dedicated nihilist and dank meme enthusiast I will leave for another day. For anyone who wants my advice on "Transitioning into Industry" I have this handy dandy PDF.

Anyway, as I said, I spent about three years trying to figure out exactly how to get a job in industry. This included taking Coursera courses, participating in Kaggle competitions, networking and even, ultimately, becoming an Insight Data Science fellow. This prestigious fellowship has a 2% acceptance rate and advertises a "100% placement rate" for the lucky accepted few.

And yet, somehow, none of these things were responsible for my first real paying job. Instead, I learned about the opening for my job from a message on the "off-topic" forum of the IceCube Slack Channel. It read:

"If anyone is looking for employment, I have a connection at Uber who is looking to hire a smart physicist working on autonomous vehicles. San Francisco, purchased startup, mix of software and hardware, low/mid salary $150-200k. Let me know if you are interested and I can forward more info and/or connect you to the principal."

Uber. At the time, I had never once taken an Uber. And although we had not yet started the Great PR Disaster of 2017, Uber already had somewhat of a negative reputation as a bully and maybe even a somewhat criminal enterprise.

So then why? Why leave academia, where I was in principle working for the "common good" and apply at a company that everyone agreed was "completely and utterly evil". Or for what reason besides being a nihilist and a dank meme enthusiast?

Obviously $150-200k a year?

I am kidding. Mostly kidding.

I will say that there was a point in my job search where I thought that what I wanted more than anything was to work for Google. I stalked them on Github. I got multiple internal references to recommend me. At the time I accepted my job at Uber I was two weeks away from formally interviewing with Google for a data scientist position. So then, why? Why Uber?

Well, I said that I wasn't really the kind of person who cared about the "common good" or a "grand vision of humanity". But maybe some of that narcissistic academic viewpoint wore off on me in those five extra years. Because the reason I chose to join not only Uber, but Otto, the most controversial and potentially evil section of that evil company, was that it made me feel for the first time that I would be working on something that could really, truly change the world. And for the first time, unlike in academia, and unlike what I had learned about Google, I found a place where people were forced to question every day whether changing the world was a good idea or not.