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Comment by pimpleypumpkin | Hacker News Reader

Tech companies and the corporate and startup world in general have proven to be more dynamic. If you are smart, driven, and have a 'get sh!t done' personality, are you going to waste your time with the kind of rules obsessed tattle-tale types that predominate in academia? In the real world, if you create something awesome, you get paid, and you get to do what you love. In academia, you get rewarded for bullsh*t that no one is going to bother to replicate and spend your time filling out paperwork (grants). Choose your own adventure.

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> In the real world, if you create something awesome, you get paid, and you get to do what you love.

You and I live in very different "real worlds" and I feel like my "real world" is well above average.

Nobody pays you in the corporate or startup world if what you do isn’t monetizable, preferably in the short term. And the measure of “awesome” there is how much and how quickly it can be monetized. It seems you haven’t understood the purpose of academia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs

Bell Labs is not the corporate or startup world, and it was a rather exceptional phenomenon. It also hasn’t produced much significant work anymore in the last twenty years or so.

And Bell Labs existed mainly because of the taxation system of US. They needed to do R&D spend to use as a tax write-off. That's why the most productive years of American tech were the years with highest rates of taxation.

The high energy fundamental physics startup scene isn't as dynamic as you are thinking.

Sounds just like tech companies tbh.

This is overly cynical and overly reductive.

Choose your own adventure but please don't ask me to pay your academia bills ;_;

Sorry but most start ups are completely dependent on VC funding. CEOs ask for money for VCs, get enough results to ask for next round of funding and so on.

Start up and academia both require money from external sources that are not directly the consumers.

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