[xtracto]

But the actual administration is if anything worse: 100-page proposals via hugely bureaucratic processes (NSF's are at least only 15 pages), unwieldy multi-country consortia, periodic mandatory status update meetings in Brussels, the works.

Tell me about it. I was 7 years in "academia" in the EU and 4 of those years was working in a FP7 (Seventh Framework Programme) project. Man, the amount of administrative baggage we have to do is amazing. "Libre research" is a myth, between monthly deliverables, 6-month review, half-way Brussels project review, you could not make a lot of research.

And then you have all the administrative controls, I kid you not, I had to log what I did every day in two places (one in EU FP7 timesheets (in Excel), and another one in my institute's own software (a terrible java program)). Sure, the upside was that I got to travel a lot (the project had about 7 participant countries).

Now I returned to the industry, I am in a company from the Silicon Valey as a "simple" software engineer (even though I have a PhD) and I could not be happier. Moreover, after a couple of months in the position I have made several contacts which are bringing new opportunities.

I am happier at my current "fast paced" job now as I was while I was in academia doing papers just trying to publish papers for the sake of it (that is how I felt).