For non-CS people – if you're a little confused by "conference paper", CS is a little idiosyncratic in that papers are often primarily disseminated through conferences, rather than independent journals. The advice is good in general, though!
My experience with Academia is that its full of people who couldn't get jobs after undergrad, so they stayed in school. Their parents are at least middle class and support this route so they can harvest some of the status of having a PhD or professor.
I'd be less bitter if so much 'science' that came out in the last 100 years didn't fail to replicate... Yet we were expected to learn it like it was fact, while signing the praises of the authors. Literal waste of resources.
Meanwhile, industry is sending the world forward with life changing improvements. I think academia would hope they had some impact on it, but I think its wishful thinking.
Sure, nowadays this whole field is pushed forward by industry. But I would argue that for most technological advancements the foundations are laid in traditional academia.
Of course if you are not in academia you will only ever get in touch with the things which work out and get picked up by industry, completing the impression that only industry is doing valuable stuff. Insert suvivorship bias meme here
Backpropagation has been reinvented multiple times, because it is a basic application of the chain rule. The earliest recognizable usage of it is in control theory at NASA during the Apollo program.
It's a mistake to be dismissive of academic work which has been very important, but it's equally a mistake to think that academia is the sole source of foundational work.
- What status do you think people with PhDs or who teach and do research have? (And do you think that having those beliefs is necessary to remain in academia?)
- Who are we learning that we’re supposed to be treating like fact, and singing the praises of? (I remember learning about, say, Hindley-Milner type inference in undergrad, but I didn’t think of it as “fact”, and nor did I have to write of its praises to pass my classes.)
- I wanted to become a mathematician, and my colleagues are currently statisticians that work on medical claims data from entire health systems. What does “replicate” mean in this case? Similarly, what does “replicate” mean in the context of industry, if a comparison is being set up here?