Also, I never called anyone arrogant, but rather the article itself. Big difference. I don't know Patrick personally, so I wouldn't label him as such.
Sure. Like I said: talk to me in ten years.
Maybe you'll still believe that academia gives you freedom to work on whatever you like. All my academic friends do. They are devoted and talented enough that they can soar blithely above the fact that:
A) In academia, you work where the research grants are. You are free to start a research project in an underfunded corner of academia to the precise extent that you are free to run your laboratory without any income;
B) You will spend the majority of your time writing those research grants.
C) Because your grant proposals can be anonymously torpedoed by any one of your colleagues with sufficient clout, you will actually spend a lot of time with your finger in the wind, carefully adjusting what you're working on to stay in tune with the zeitgeist.
None of the above feels much like freedom to me. Your own mileage may vary, of course. Maybe you're in CS and you can run your lab on a relative pittance. Maybe you'll meet a rich benefactor who loves to fund whatever you want to do. Maybe you can hold down a day job until your peers give you funding for your novel project, like my former field's big hero Judah Folkman did: His proposals to study antiangiogenesis went nowhere for something like fifteen years, so he just kept his day job as Director of Surgical Research at Children's Hospital Boston and kept trying. What can I say? Clearly my advice would have been useless to Folkman. Patrick and I are trying to advise the median programmer, not the fourth standard deviation.
Right after my undergrad, I worked in the industry for 5 years and then went to Grad school. Since completing the grad school it has been 10 more years in the industry.
My industry experience has been great so far and I love what I do. I consider my Grad school experience as an enlightening and enjoyable period of my life.
Not everyone has a bad grad school experience. No need to beat down the academic experience. A lot of people gain from it. A career in academia is not the same as being a student.
It seems to me that both are being looked down upon here.