>You can't focus on a hard problem for ten years or do research on interesting theoretical problems in industry. Sure you can. You simply spend a bit of time o

>You can't focus on a hard problem for ten years or do research on interesting theoretical problems in industry. Sure you can. You simply spend a bit of time on farming out practical applications to other teams or filling patents or writing publications. Comes out to less overhead than in academia with grants, managing students, writing papers, etc. Sure, 99.99% of industry is applied however 0.01% of a massive thing is still very large so there's plenty of non-applied work being done. Industry is massive and painting every little piece of it with the same brush is a very unjust way of looking at it. I'd recommend you actually learn about things and talk to people before making broad generalizations about them.