[rayiner]

I think it's actually the opposite. Academia is more divorced from industry in the computer science world than say the aerospace world. When I was working with grad students as an aerospace major, they were by and large working directly on problems relevant to industry. Most computer science research seems much more mathematical/theoretical than practical, in comparison. I think this is also a relatively recent phenomenon. Compare say Preston Brigg's thesis on graph coloring register allocation (1992) to Sebastian Hack's thesis on register allocation for SSA form programs (2007). The former I think was much more written with implementers in mind, and the latter has a lot more math and proofs (though it's more readable than a lot of CS papers these days, which can tend towards a dense maze of proofs and esoteric notation).

Indeed, I think there is a language barrier between CS academia and CS industry that doesn't exist between AE academia and AE industry. In aerospace, everyone speaks the language of differential equations, finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics, etc. But CS academia is deeply steeped in type theory, automated proofs, etc, while CS industry talks about object orientation and test frameworks, etc.