Low skilled workers are treated better and more fairly than Graduate Students in a lot of occasions
Graduate students are as a rule underpaid, overworked and if they're unlucky harassed to boot and all that for the privilege of having someone else then finally take most or even all of the credit for all the hard work.
My biggest quirk about the universities and institutes I've worked for so far is not the way they deal with grad students or postdocs, it's about seemingly 'unimportant' issues. Things like large, noisy, shared offices, lack of whiteboards, unnecessary bureaucracy, and lack of paid linguistic editing. At universities money tends to be saved at the wrong end, private businesses are much better at creating productive environments. Especially the constant lack of office space is hampering productivity. The priorities tend to be wrong (outside of a few centers of excellence), focused on getting as many researchers as possible. Instead they should spend a bit less on human resources and a bit more on a good work environment.
At least that's my personal experience and opinion.
I had great resources in some places (access to the finest minds in my field, for example) and was completely hamstrung in others (a hard salary cap as an assistant researcher, extreme difficulty getting a new whiteboard installed in my office, etc)
Industry isn't perfect either but seems to be better at recognizing that researchers are best used in the role they were trained for and not doing ancillary work.
I suspect I could make more money as a 'pure' software developer, but it would not be a factor of 2. And I'm doing what I love and largely choosing my own research direction. It needs to have an ultimate business application, but finding that alignment is not particularly difficult.
As with many scientists, having the resources I need to accomplish my research is often the stickier point. I have money for a few coops to do more speculative research, and annual equipment (I need clusters to do what I do). I don't have trouble getting funding for 2-3 conferences each year, which is all I need (more is a distraction, IMO). I'm hoping to start building out my group in a few years.
And I can do largely autonomous research work, very much like what I did as a researcher in academia. Arguably I am even more autonomous here, as I do not have a research adviser/boss.
As a person without a PhD, my sense is that "research" as a field is Not For Me, even in industry, because the PhD is the critical factor that determines whether one is "researcher material".
While I certainly would not call it academic hell, getting a PhD was very hard for me. However, while it was hard, I loved it. If you don't love it you probably[1] do not love research, and then you would absolutely hate the day to day.
[1] Probably because many things can make life miserable. A bad adviser being #1. I was lucky to have an absolutely incredible adviser who really helped me through. Of course, the other challenge is the very poor salary. I had a wonderful support network and no college debt so I could survive, and even then it was hard.
I was thinking about continuing my education to do research in distributed computing, but I learned midway through my undergraduate, majoring in computer science with the "Software Engineering" track, that our field was already playing catchup with industry. I learned this because I worked for a startup my senior year. Their pace, learning, and new innovation was nothing our dusty class with out of touch professors were able to keep up with. Even the ones that were trying to be "cool" by teaching stuff like Ruby on Rails (mind you, this was in 2008 so it was the hip thing at the time) instead of Java Server Faces, it was just bad. You could tell the professors had no idea what it took to build software. After being in the industry about 10 years now, probably the biggest joke of a course I took and arguably a complete waste of money was CS 3100 -- Software Engineering. It was an entire class on Object Oriented programming with Java, and using UML diagrams to model everything, and CRC cards and all this object oriented cruft. Everything was an object nail to drill with your object hammer. It was at this point I was becoming more familiar with LISPs and dynamic/functional programming languages, and I started to care more about behavior rather than creating a tangled web of leaky abstractions.
Anyways, why go get my masters in distributed computing when I know it will be hilariously out of date and all the best innovation in distributed computing is coming from large, internet-scale companies such as Twitter, Google, Netflix, Facebook et all? But unless I could get into Stanford, which is essentially the big tech firm's R&D arm, I don't see the point. I was thinking of the Georgia Tech OMSCS, but I think I am too jaded at this point.
We were assigned teams of four, wrote hundreds of pages of requirement papers, design papers, everything papers. Then we wrote the code in PHP in one night.
For the final section of the class, 3 teams of 4 were merged into teams of 12. It's obvious that no college students have the desire or ability to manage a team of 12, as it's a huge task even for an experienced manager. The overhead of having 12 people involved was incredible. Fortunately, more than half the students in the group were happy to be "fired": we didn't talk to them at all, did the work in a smaller, more nimble group, and everyone got a good grade.
which got us to question other lectures, and find out that the exact truth - depends on the circumstances.
PS: If you strip university down to its basics- its basically society accepted basic income for three/four years - to do whatever you want- if one does not use that, because s/he is chasing some gamified credits in exchange for real credit - is it really fair to blame that on the professors of that institution?
They must teach something, in a field, where half the innovations are basically secret and the other half is outdated the moment you write exams.
So what can you expect from a university?
We learned C/C++/Java.
Object Orientation is still a valid crutch for most programmers, who would otherwise fall back into procedural decay.
Functional programming languages are great, but hard on the novice mind.
Software engineering was one of those courses that are not usefull until you are out in the trenches. Still the Prof had valuable and valid war stories of theire own time in companys and lots of stuff you can find here on HN as advice including:
"He who writes down everything, is the last man standing."
Nobody claimed to have a silver bullet.
I am finding it difficult to unpack this, but the basic assertion that it is some free time for you to explore and figure yourself out -- that's great, if it is on your dime. If it is on someone else's dime, I would hope you would be somewhat a little more responsible with other people's money (That's how we ended up with all those memes about millennials: because there is a little truth in every meme).
Put another way, I worked my ass off delivering pizzas and working doubles on the weekend to pay for my nice state college. I am not trying to state some survivorship bias here, but rather illustrate the point of view you have when you work your literal ass off for every dollar. Spending it wisely then becomes your #1 priority. For all the sweat I put into being graced with the privilege of attending the "prestigious" state college of somewhere, USA, I wasn't about to spend another minute in there than I had to, because I saw waste and uselessness everywhere I turned and because I think I calculated my costs personally -- it came out to something like the rate of 200 dollars an hour per hour of actual education I received there -- That's a pretty nice consulting fee if you ask me.
Honestly these days, I think it's all a big racket, but I have hope for the future generation. These kids going to college now and racking up these student debts that will never be repaid, they are slowly but surely realizing they were duped.
In Germany college is free- so waste wherever you look- but i found i could invest that time and learn something there. And the professors where quite down to earth- also the sort of college i visit has a requirement that professors spend every fourth semester in the industry.
In contrast, as a consultant i met many companys, incredible proud on there tech- and only few of them really where as golden as they saw themselves.
If you haven't even booted up a VM on a cloud provider to try stuff out, why do you expect to have a career in it?
In my case, it's a bit different, but it has been disappointing enough that I'm trying to ditch the program with my MSc in hand.