[jxramos]

totally this. I had a boss once who took me aside in her office to probe interests and direction. Somewhere she quipped about work in academia being paid peanuts. It was a pretty shocking statement and attitude to hear it so bluntly, especially being so close in time to my own graduation and years at the university and admiration for that world. But in all honesty I never heard it challenged much.

Later as I started to hear more about how economies function and how revenues really build up and stem from consumers in volume I came to realize that things that ultimately benefit a lot of people generate a lot of money. I saw an intermediary of this working at Apple and seeing how much funds they had to spend vs biomedical companies that were more conservative with their funds. Consumer electronics and consumer products in general have a lot of customers, benefit a lot of people, and ultimately earn a lot of money.

Academia is much more limited in its scope and immediate benefit. That delay in benefit shapes the money involved in all sorts of surprising ways that aren't immediately apparent while still under the wings of the academic world and the "currencies" they operate with be it notoriety, prizes, grants, etc etc. Ultimately the results and products of academia are suspect and risky since they're often in the prototype unvetted phase of birthing into existence. Those thoughts Elon Musk shares while touring Starbase about design vs manufacturing in the gauntlet of tests against reality where the two forms get vetted side by side come to mind here. His statement of "design is overrated" probably has a close analogue in academia. Products of the mind are essentially untested and may not stand up to reality along whatever dimensions one needs to evaluate them against, or as is probably more often the case simple don't scale to the degree needed to impact a large number of people in a short time frame to translate to paying customers.