My opinion, exaggerated a little, take it with a grain of salt: The opportunities (scale, compute power, funding, how close you are to the edge of the state of

My opinion, exaggerated a little, take it with a grain of salt: The opportunities (scale, compute power, funding, how close you are to the edge of the state of the art) for research in industry are currently uniformly better than the opportunities for research in academia, and industry pays an order of magnitude or so more too. If you followed ten "famous" CS profs five years ago, I'd guess that at least eight of them quit academia (despite having tenure) and now work at Google or Facebook. So I think it's clear, at least to me, that if you want to do research it would be better to do it at a Major One. But I understand that it's hard to pull that off early in your career. Still, I would keep trying before taking the second-best option of academia.