Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview

> I was even invited to share my work directly with Regina Dugan, the director of ATAP at that time! I was excited, thinking perhaps I would be invited for a summer internship. It turned out they found my work so relevant that they offered me a job on the spot.

> It was a tough choice: I had just started the first year of my PhD and would’ve had to take a leave from the program to pursue this project. After asking many people, the advice was clear: stay in school. So I decided to turn down the offer and continue pursuing my PhD.

...this sounds like terrible advice? I have to wonder whether any of the "many people" consulted weren't professors.

It’s almost always better to achieve for yourself instead of others. A PhD. is infinitely more valuable than a couple of years working for any company, especially if your subject is interesting enough to on-spot hire you before you finish.

And I say that as a manager who’s hired a lot of people before they earned X because their work was interesting. I don’t do it anymore, as a rule, because it crushed a lot of those people with regret later and I have to live with that.