I agree. I'm an academic librarian, and they're completely different ways of working: When I do academic work, I (ideally) have to take my time and I'm not sup

I agree. I'm an academic librarian, and they're completely different ways of working: When I do academic work, I (ideally) have to take my time and I'm not supposed to present my work until it's developed enough that I'm confident it presents a substantial improvement; I have to prove that it's worth a colleague's time to engage with by meeting certain requirements. Coding/developing, on the other hand, requires a lot more back and forth, a lot more "I don't know", and is more immediate in a way I find very satisfying. I would LOVE to see more back and forth between engineers and academics in terms of ways of working; I think there's a lot of benefit to be gained there: Tech tends to not consider the future as much as they should, but the academics could really benefit from doing what you mentioned and improve the system they work in rather than accepting it. One of the things I'm trying to do is get better at/learn some ML so I can play around with turning the things I learned in grad school into useful tools, but I'm a single journeyman dev doing this in my spare time so odds of anything actually useful coming out of it is small.