Beyond that, a lot of software engineering research doesn't seem to be easily reachable or discovered unless you're in academia.
Real world software engineering has to ship a real working product, while academic software engineering only has to produce a paper. Maybe that's an unfair representation though.
There are any number of reasons I have stayed engineering track instead of going into management but the biggest is that talking about things and doing them are vastly different, and we’ve structured management and research around talking. Some days I worry I may know more about project management than I know about cloud or React, but it would kill me to be telling people how to do the job that I’m not also doing, and if I don’t like how they did it, have only words available to get it fixed.
In one of my hobbies, time and the pandemic have slowed me down quite a bit and I’m trying to manage more and do less, but unlike work there are plenty of opportunities to lead by doing. Doing 5-10% of the work and then guiding people to do the rest is socially acceptable.
In software we sometimes call that a lead developer, but that definition changes from situation to situation. But the more you do the less influence you tend to have on what you’re doing and why. Is that human nature or leftover from feudalism?
Building these products would be a great teaching tool and contribution to society. Also there could be a lot of research done on how to build complex software where the product is the software itself and it can be applied to other sciences that badly need software. I for one would love to get a graduate degree while building some product where I get to try different software design approaches.
It's funny, back in my undergrad days I would walk past the Google offices that opened near my campus. I'd look in and see a giant wall-sized candy machine, primary colors everywhere, bean bags, pool tables, an air hockey table. I honestly thought it was a daycare of some kind until I asked someone why there's never any kids in there. This is what they call the "real world" apparently, as a contrast to what goes on in academia.
I can definitely say that in all my years in academia, I've never been treated to a candy wall.