[YeGoblynQueenne]

Well, my experience in the industry was that I changed five jobs in six years because in order for my work to be valued as highly as it was really worth, I had to sell it to someone new every year.

What is really brutal in academia is the competition to get your research published and appreciated (by being cited and reused by others). This doesn't happen automatically. The pressure to find something useful to contribute cannot be compared to the pressures in the industry where you basically just have to keep your boss happy if you want to stay in the money. It's a bit like an artistic career, really. You're constantly trying to hit the top 10.

And remember that academics are always required to do something genuinely new, not just "Uber for ice cream, but with AI".

[screye]

> And remember that academics are always required to do something genuinely new, not just "Uber for ice cream, but with AI".

This hasn't been my experience. A lot of papers coming out today are quite iterative.

They sound exactly like:"what if system X had feature Y". Just with more scientific jargon.

[dd36]

Lots of academics do “Uber for ice cream but with AI.” Academia is iterative.

Arguably, it’s even less competitive than the real world. It’s theory vs. practice. Guess what’s hard? Getting enough paying customers to be sustainable.

[mattkrause]

> Arguably, it’s even less competitive than the real world.

This might be true at an "organizational" level but I have a hard time believing it's true for individuals.

There are a few people in academia who have incredibly lavish funding (HHMI investigators, people with rich 'patrons'). A few tenured professors can opt out of competition, though this either dramatically limits their impact (no money for students/equipment --> much less research).

Everyone else is constantly scrapping for money and attention and the results are mostly assessed individually, or at best across a small group (PI + 2-4 trainees). In industry, this is at least averaged over the whole company or division.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

>> Lots of academics do “Uber for ice cream but with AI.” Academia is iterative.

Iterative, yes, but it must be innovative, not a recombination of existing contributions.

Also, if you only ever contribute tiny baby steps, you will simply not stand out. If you want to build a strong reputation you need strong results that advance the state of the art significantly.

[king_magic]

This still sounds like a bunch of excuses to continue abusing people. Intense pressure exists everywhere: don't put academic work on a magical pedestal, there's a lot more to working in the industry than just keeping your boss happy (and uh, a lot more happens in the industry than just building the next Uber for X).

Still no excuse to overwork people to near death (yes, there are extreme outliers like Goldman Sachs & whatnot, but this kind of overwork is a pandemic in academia).

[YeGoblynQueenne]

I don't follow- where is the excuse?

I left one of my junior dev positions in the industry with a stomach ulcer as a souvenir. I don't know what Goldman Sachs is like, but as a junior developer you're expected to do all the work for half the money it's worth and in half the time it would take your senior colleagues.

Edit: and while youre senior colleagues treat your work like rubbish to justify their senior salaries.