My advisor asked me to co-author a paper, but I have no interest in an academic career

An answer to this question on the Academia Stack Exchange.

Question

I recently finished an undergraduate program and obtained an engineer’s degree. I am working as a software engineer at an automotive company and I can only imagine myself having a career in “production”, meaning working for a private company for a while and eventually starting a company of my own or working as a freelancer. This is to say I have no interest in pursuing a career in academia.

In my country it is very common that people start a master’s degree immediately after finishing their bachelor’s degree. I did not enlist for a master’s program and I am still debating whether I find it worth doing several years from now or not.

However, recently the professor that acted as my advisor for my diploma project asked me whether I want to co-author a paper that would be presented at a conference and later submitted for publishing in a journal. The paper’s topic encompasses the topic of my diploma project and the professor said he would like to use parts of my project for this paper.

I like the idea of being a co-author on a published paper, but I suspect this will mean a lot of work and I wouldn’t want to do it if the only thing I got out of it was the achievement alone. Would there be anything to gain from doing this if I don’t intend to pursue a career in academia? If there is no good reason to do it, would it be appropriate to give the professor permission to use my project for his paper without asking to be listed as co-author?

EDIT: Thank you very much for all your answers and encouragement! I emailed the professor back telling him I was interested, but that the time I could invest was limited and he told me it would not be a problem since he will write the paper, my previous work being enough of a contribution already.

Answer

Folks answering on this site may have a bias towards publishing, so let's talk about this in a way which abstracts from the paper a bit.

Getting a job requires:

  • Demonstrating an ability to get things done.
  • The ability to talk about the things you have done.

Getting parts of your undergrad work published provides evidence that you can get things done. Saying you did X project/research during your undergrad is very different from saying that you did X project/research with Y quantifiable outcome---a (peer reviewed?) paper in this case. The latter demonstrates that you weren't dinking around. You built something that made it into the broader world. Any potential employee who can demonstrate that has a leg up.

But when you apply to your next job your current job will supply sufficient evidence of that, right?

Not necessarily.

Many jobs require you to sign NDAs which make you unable to speak about what you've done or require you to be vague about it and your role in it. In contrast, since this is academic publishing, once the paper is out you're free to discuss any and all details about the work. This freedom gives you the opportunity to dive deeply into technical problems you solved in a way that might not be possible with your industry work.

In summary, having a number of completed, quantifiable projects you can talk about in-depth can only help in future interviews.