People in academia are smart enough, they made that choice voluntarily and nobody held a gun to their head.
It's a voluntary trade-off for lower pay to work in the field you want.
There is a difference between churning out code you really hate for 500k/yr, and doing what you are interested in for 80/10/150k. The vast majority people in software aren't aching to reinvent the wheel, but in a new js framework every year, they just do it for the money.
Research grant money is still money, even if the academics decide to take a trade-off others don't.
How would you like to NEVER receive grant money again? Gonna bite the hand that feeds you?
> There is a difference between churning out code you really hate for 500k/yr, and doing what you are interested in for 80/10/150k.
LOL, no.
Industry is way better than academia on the qualitative stuff.
First, STEM PhDs who qualify for R1 faculty positions but who instead go into industry are not doing shit with javascript frameworks. What kind of insane company would waste such specific and highly developed skills on that kind of nonsense?
Second, people running wet labs aren't "doing what they want". They're doing contract work for funding agencies. In terms of both freedom and enjoyment, it's much closer to a mid-level manager body-shop position at Accenture than a "life of mind". FAANG IC life is luxurious by comparison.
My friends in academia are constantly tweaking/justifying what they work on. I do what I want, make 5x-10x more, and have way better resources/staff.
And that's all before giving a 2 hour lecture to 500 kids while wearing an N-95, then going home and giving the same lecture to another 200 kinds on zoom.
I've exaggerated only a little about js frameworks. I've had a PhD from Geoff Hintons group do manual QA once for a few months. Far worse things occur on the regular, nobody really cares about highly theoretical concerns such as "waste of potential" in practice.
Some FAANGs even have a policy of hiring talent just to deny it to competition. Figure out what they'll do after you hire them, no real planning on that part.
However, the larger point remains: people in science labs for some reason stay in the lab. Why? Maybe they just like complaining or suffering? Maybe so, but if they want to - they can quit any time, but they for some reason remain.
I had a friend from Fermilab who left to do quant finance on wallst, only to return to physics because he found finance boring, even though very well paid. Much better paid than FAANG.
You just happen to like what you are working on at FAANG. Not everyone does, and plenty burn out and leave the field entirely.
It's a voluntary trade-off for lower pay to work in the field you want.
There is a difference between churning out code you really hate for 500k/yr, and doing what you are interested in for 80/10/150k. The vast majority people in software aren't aching to reinvent the wheel, but in a new js framework every year, they just do it for the money.
Research grant money is still money, even if the academics decide to take a trade-off others don't.
How would you like to NEVER receive grant money again? Gonna bite the hand that feeds you?