Weird egos. I moved from academia to industry and constantly got told "In industry we just care that 'it works'". I thought that was a weird premise, given... you know... who doesn't? But the more time I spent in industry the more time I found that they in fact do not care if it actually works. What seems to matter more is the politics and about "working"[0] the right way using the right new buzzword[1]
Truth is that the work and complexity is not that divorced. Honestly, the work in academia felt harder, though more fulfilling. Industry work hasn't made me have to really think deeply. If anything, I've heard most of my coworkers (at multiple companies) say something along the lines of "we have to move so fast that there's no time to think." Given that (multiple) managers tell me I'm "too slow" just because I'm not producing tons of lines of code (I'm neck and neck with everyone on milestones), I understand what they're talking about. Industry has a working mode of "do first, think second" while academia often thinks first. The reason is really because it is a lot cheaper to think first.
[0] It works enough for some demo to some person
[1] One example is I beat a company's fancy giant transformer based image detector with a scrappy CNN that took only a few hours to train. They were excited for all of 1 day and then wouldn't let me do the same thing to the transformer model (which would have had a bigger impact). Fun fact, my boss also loved to tell me about how dumb academia is because they never do anything useful and how industry makes all the real advancements.
> Fun fact, my boss also loved to tell me about how dumb academia is because they never do anything useful and how industry makes all the real advancements.
It has always seemed clear to me that the world requires two types of people.
1. "Thinkers", those extraordinarily brilliant people who spend lots of time on a single problem, discovering the optimal and most performance theoretical solution
2. "Hackers", who assemble tools by implementing designs from "Thinkers"
Without Thinkers the Hacker could not possibly solve all required problems well a single tool/product requires
Without Hackers the Thinkers work would languish in the ivory tower it was conceived in
>If anything, I've heard most of my coworkers (at multiple companies) say something along the lines of "we have to move so fast that there's no time to think.
Anecdotally, the tide on this is changing—all the low-hanging fruit has been picked and I see/hear many of my older colleagues regret not having gone the whole way with a PhD. This on top of AI being able to answer many of the engineering questions you might have learned the answers to in a masters/bachelors.
>Fun fact, my boss also loved to tell me about how dumb academia is because they never do anything useful and how industry makes all the real advancements.
He's not entirely wrong though. Industry makes the advancements that actually supposed to sell and be profitable on the free market. Academia is all over the place, as not everything being researched there can be used commercially, often it's just to get grant money, push papers and raise their egos amongst their peers.
That's not the pipeline at all. Academia creates the foundation industry sits on. There's a lot more failure, yes, but hits are way more impactful. Innovations generate entire industries.
So weird argument. Academia isn't meant to be "profitable" because no one is measuring the indirect profits. But when you do it's comically large
Why are you conflating and equating "useful" with "sells for profit on the free market"?
There are many areas of research where profit is not a goal, and cannot be one. Understanding how and why climate changes is extremely important and useful, but cannot turn a profit. Researching different education methods, same. Hell, the researchers who won the 2024 Nobel prize in economics, who helped us understand how to build economically successful nations, something incredibly useful, cannot turn a profit with their research.
It's frankly absurd to expect everything useful to be profitable.
Drug development is just a totally different game. The tools are the same but the difference between what the reviewers at your favorite high impact publication want and what the FDA wants are pretty different. People spend their whole careers getting good at the latter in the same way people get good at the former.
I've seen people come from academia and thrive and I've also seen the struggle. Some people also go to school with the goal of doing drug development, which sometimes academic folks don't realize.
- person who was good at microscope and ended up in early stage drug development ~10y
Biotech and academia have very different standards for data quality and reproducibility. Most of the biotech people I know view academic research as an interesting first draft at best.
If it's a constant offset like you say, and given academia publishes and industry often doesn't, that might suggest it's dependent on the rate of advancement in academic research. Not in this field so I may be wildly off.
That may depend on the field. My experience (in bioinformatics method development) is that people in the industry can't afford to work on state-of-the-art problems. But once a problem has become established and it's important enough to be worth their time, they will eventually come up with a better solution due to their superior resources.
Because the results from an acedemic paper are not, ever, going to be injected into a customer's arm. Developing products for sale in the real world is very different than designing lab experiments.
Sure, but it would seem the solution would be to hire the recently minted PhDs and teach them through more senior staff how to operate in the real world, just like in literally any other profession.
Instead you’ll just whine until they let you import a billion more Indians
Weird egos. I moved from academia to industry and constantly got told "In industry we just care that 'it works'". I thought that was a weird premise, given... you know... who doesn't? But the more time I spent in industry the more time I found that they in fact do not care if it actually works. What seems to matter more is the politics and about "working"[0] the right way using the right new buzzword[1]
Truth is that the work and complexity is not that divorced. Honestly, the work in academia felt harder, though more fulfilling. Industry work hasn't made me have to really think deeply. If anything, I've heard most of my coworkers (at multiple companies) say something along the lines of "we have to move so fast that there's no time to think." Given that (multiple) managers tell me I'm "too slow" just because I'm not producing tons of lines of code (I'm neck and neck with everyone on milestones), I understand what they're talking about. Industry has a working mode of "do first, think second" while academia often thinks first. The reason is really because it is a lot cheaper to think first.
[0] It works enough for some demo to some person
[1] One example is I beat a company's fancy giant transformer based image detector with a scrappy CNN that took only a few hours to train. They were excited for all of 1 day and then wouldn't let me do the same thing to the transformer model (which would have had a bigger impact). Fun fact, my boss also loved to tell me about how dumb academia is because they never do anything useful and how industry makes all the real advancements.
It has always seemed clear to me that the world requires two types of people.
1. "Thinkers", those extraordinarily brilliant people who spend lots of time on a single problem, discovering the optimal and most performance theoretical solution
2. "Hackers", who assemble tools by implementing designs from "Thinkers"
Without Thinkers the Hacker could not possibly solve all required problems well a single tool/product requires
Without Hackers the Thinkers work would languish in the ivory tower it was conceived in
>If anything, I've heard most of my coworkers (at multiple companies) say something along the lines of "we have to move so fast that there's no time to think.
Anecdotally, the tide on this is changing—all the low-hanging fruit has been picked and I see/hear many of my older colleagues regret not having gone the whole way with a PhD. This on top of AI being able to answer many of the engineering questions you might have learned the answers to in a masters/bachelors.
>Fun fact, my boss also loved to tell me about how dumb academia is because they never do anything useful and how industry makes all the real advancements.
He's not entirely wrong though. Industry makes the advancements that actually supposed to sell and be profitable on the free market. Academia is all over the place, as not everything being researched there can be used commercially, often it's just to get grant money, push papers and raise their egos amongst their peers.
That's not the pipeline at all. Academia creates the foundation industry sits on. There's a lot more failure, yes, but hits are way more impactful. Innovations generate entire industries.
So weird argument. Academia isn't meant to be "profitable" because no one is measuring the indirect profits. But when you do it's comically large
1 reply →
Why are you conflating and equating "useful" with "sells for profit on the free market"?
There are many areas of research where profit is not a goal, and cannot be one. Understanding how and why climate changes is extremely important and useful, but cannot turn a profit. Researching different education methods, same. Hell, the researchers who won the 2024 Nobel prize in economics, who helped us understand how to build economically successful nations, something incredibly useful, cannot turn a profit with their research.
It's frankly absurd to expect everything useful to be profitable.
4 replies →
Drug development is just a totally different game. The tools are the same but the difference between what the reviewers at your favorite high impact publication want and what the FDA wants are pretty different. People spend their whole careers getting good at the latter in the same way people get good at the former. I've seen people come from academia and thrive and I've also seen the struggle. Some people also go to school with the goal of doing drug development, which sometimes academic folks don't realize. - person who was good at microscope and ended up in early stage drug development ~10y
Biotech and academia have very different standards for data quality and reproducibility. Most of the biotech people I know view academic research as an interesting first draft at best.
I can’t speak to this particular sector; however, I have found academics to lag 5-7y behind the realities of the business world I operate in.
Business moves incredibly fast; academia, not so much.
If it’s constantly 5-7 years behind isn’t it moving at the same speed just with an offset?
If it's a constant offset like you say, and given academia publishes and industry often doesn't, that might suggest it's dependent on the rate of advancement in academic research. Not in this field so I may be wildly off.
only if they are always going in the same direction
That may depend on the field. My experience (in bioinformatics method development) is that people in the industry can't afford to work on state-of-the-art problems. But once a problem has become established and it's important enough to be worth their time, they will eventually come up with a better solution due to their superior resources.
Because the results from an acedemic paper are not, ever, going to be injected into a customer's arm. Developing products for sale in the real world is very different than designing lab experiments.
Sure, but it would seem the solution would be to hire the recently minted PhDs and teach them through more senior staff how to operate in the real world, just like in literally any other profession.
Instead you’ll just whine until they let you import a billion more Indians
Because that's ultimately their goal! It's just smoke, mirrors, and complaining so they can get the cheap labor.