Six months ago I wrote a post called “I’m Quitting the University” (I’m Quitting the University) and promised to explain why I left.

Students would often come up to me and ask: “Vladimir Igorevich, why are you still working here instead of going to the U.S.”? Blushing, I would answer: “And who’s going to teach you, then?” or “I’m occupying my social role” or the downright philosophical: “If I had left, we wouldn’t have met”.

From 2005 to 2016, I had four roles at the university:

— teacher;
— researcher;
— manager;
— clerk.

In the role of clerk, I was a member of the university’s Council of Young Scientists. It was an All Stars council, because it had the most active and smartest young people from our university. One of the brightest moments of our work on the Council was submitting a proposal on how to change the Youth Forum so that it would become attractive to young scientists from outside, and simply to set the bar higher, not be the disgrace it is now. But the university administration did not support us. After some time it became clear that we were a “pocket council”.

As a manager, I supervised student projects at the APVT department. I also met a bunch of talented people; years later, we’re still in touch with many of them. Working with students is interesting, but not easy. Very often it happened that students simply disappeared the moment the semester ended and the term paper had been submitted.

— But what about turning the term paper into a cool startup, implementing it, selling it?
— Well, some other time.

As a researcher, I wrote papers and a dissertation. Science is one of the most exciting kinds of work, because you are constantly learning, and there’s no end in sight. You can’t research something completely. But it takes a lot of time. Especially since our field is technical — it takes ten times more time than theoretical sciences. Because of the shortage in my time budget, my scientific result turned out proportionally modest.

As a teacher, I was the first at our university (and in Ukraine, too) to develop and teach courses on parallel programming on multicore processors, designing systems-on-chip using the SystemC language, mobile platform programming, and cloud service programming. Not all students appreciated my work as much as it deserved. I remember that day very well. It was Friday, April 22, 2016. I had prepared for the last lecture in the mobile platform programming course. It was supposed to be a cool lecture about mobile analytics. But out of two groups, only one person came to class. A week later I held the last lab, mechanically entered the students’ grades. After the lab I stopped by the department head’s office and said that I was leaving.

A question arises. If not money, then what motivated me to work at the university? In business school we were taught that, as it turns out, salary is not a motivating factor. In the modern theory of motivation (Herzberg), motivating factors are success, career growth, recognition and approval of work results, creative growth, and a high degree of responsibility.

No success at the university — no motivation to work there.

Now the time I used to spend at the university on lectures, I spend on lectures in my own organization. This has a very big effect, and with it success. There is success — there is motivation to give them.

At the university I was the town lunatic, and outside it — an expert in software product development.

To be fair, I want to note several major successes. First, participating in the project to develop the Sigetest fault simulation system — above all, a great deal of work by Sergey Zaichenko. Second, participating in the work of the organizing committee of the East-West Design & Test Symposium — the great and persistent work of Prof. Khakhanov, Chumachenko, Litvinova, and all the volunteers. And the cherry on top — running the “Python at APVT” club. Everyone there is great; it’s hard to single anyone out. :)