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Comment by javert | Hacker News Reader

I'm 3 years into a PhD at a "second-tier" department (i.e. not MIT or Stanford, but still a pretty good place), and I've never felt any pressure at all to go into academia over industry. So there's one more data point for you.

Professors can make a huge "real-world contribution" via their students that go into industry. So they should be proud of those students and feel that the effort of educating them was highly worthwhile.

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It's good to know there are still realistic perspectives in academia. To be fair, the "anti-industry" attitude is probably adviser rather than department dependent, as I have heard a few first-hand data points regarding advisers that align much more with your experience than mine.

Given the 1/10 statistic, sooner or later professors will have to satisfy themselves with student's "real-world" contributions, whether they like it or not. I'm just worried how often I see real skill sets (e.g. proper software engineering) being devalued among graduate students because it's not directly relevant to a hypothetical future job as a professor. I feel lucky that I've been able to make extra time to write "real" code from my dissertation work, but it's rather unfortunate that this isn't always the norm.

A professor from a local university was giving a computer science related talk; he was quite proud of how many of his PhD students (graduated and ungraduated) had been recruited by Google.

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