It's not that academics are not a useful precursor to work, but that the academy and the company are evaluating people on apparently orthogonal metrics. Which in itself is a really interesting result.

No kidding. I once read an article where a lady at Google was giving resume advice for how to stand out and get hired by an awesome company, like Google. She gives her own resume as an example, and after one glance I'm frankly pissed off.

Why? Her resume shows she graduated college at age 12. Well Hells bells, señorita, if I was a genius like that getting hired at Google would be (more of a) cinch for me, too.