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Comment by themoonbus | Hacker News Reader

Or, to put it another way, there are far more paths to success in the private sector than in academia. People change careers, move upwards, downwards, sideways, etc.

Academia is much less forgiving.

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In STEM, I have the very strong impression that there are many paths that will take you off the academic track, and essentially none that will get you back on it. E.g. you have to keep up with the current literature to some degree.

There are rare instances of people coming back to academia after being very successful in industry. It's hard to say whether the rate is low because there's a bias against it from the hiring committees, or if people are actually generally happy in industry and uninterested in going back, or likely some combination of both.

"after being very successful in industry"

I've heard of one example of that in the MIT AI Lab in the '60-70s, although it helped that "very successful" can equal "can pay for his research budget" ^_^. And of course there weren't many real CS graduates to turn into faculty members in the bad old days.

Back in the glory days of the 1960's you'd often see a scientist who'd made big money for a company get an endowed chair somewhere.

I went to a startup after my phd for a few years, came back and am now a prof. I can't say I was very successful in industry. It happens, it's fairly rare, but it is definately becoming more common

Exactly, and I can't imagine how it's possible to keep up with current literature when you are out of the academic conference circuit, and no longer have access to a university library that pays for access to journals.

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