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Comment by nightowl_games | Hacker News Reader

Can you elaborate on this? I've been inundated with stories of how shitty it is in academia.

No intellectual stimulation, no peers at your level. Academia is challenging, fun, motivating, and you can always find interesting people to talk to. It’s really boring in the real world.

Without wanting to pass judgement I would expect that you are suffering from a narrow sample size.

I have had _very_ different experiences outside academia, depending on factors like the peers within the team, type of business, company size, city, culture/country, etc.

In all of these, I found places that were a lot worse and depressing and places a lot more interesting and motivating when comparing to academia. There literally is a whole world out there, perhaps you just haven't found the right place for you yet?

My experience in industry is primarily IEEE 802.3 meetings, which is industry but all academic types. I currently work in academia. I can say that the productivity focused nature of high end industry is focused, but suffers from inefficiencies in administrative and ego-shaped overheads. In the sexy research areas you don’t have to waste time on all of the things related to scaling up that industry does.

To get back to the topic at hand: industry can have rooms with stimulating conversations. Academia can have rooms devoid of interesting conversations. I’d put my money on the organization that focuses on intellectual discovery to be the one that garners more interesting discussions on average than the organization that is driven by profit.*

* Academia is still certainly sick with money and corruption problems at all levels right now.

It really helps to keep unofficial ties to universities, both socially and professionally. Universities have random talks all the time that you can just go show up to and talk with people. I've also attended a fair share of Phd. gatherings.

If you happen to be in Europe, showing up to one of these talks from "industry" gives you an immediate inflated status because of how EU funding works (if I was ranting I would claim how broken it is). Every grant-seeker is searching for "industrial partners" to put on their grant's "consortium". Some universities are even okay with assigning 100% of the IP rights to the "industrial partner" in the case of e.g. a student thesis project.

My two plus decades in academia have been amazing. I am surrounded by really cool people with interesting backgrounds doing fascinating work. Our students work incredibly hard and really bring a lot of positive energy to campus. The hours can be long, especially when teaching, but there is also a lot of flexibility which was really important when my kids were growing up.

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