Comment by PeterStuer

An academic's whole career is built on credit assignment for research breakthroughs. If someone else takes the credit, you lose. This is fundamentally different from a builder. You create things, solve problems and get paid for that instance. Nobody cares you 'invented' the blueprint for that building method. Your job is to instantiate. 100 Contractors can be building instance the exact same building somewhere else, it would not affect you. Most of IT builders are paid for what is basically 2 or 3 tier CRUD.