> Academia is characterized by well-trodden problems, hashed over for decades, and negligible novel data for resolving them. Industry is by comparison a mass of

> Academia is characterized by well-trodden problems, hashed over for decades, and negligible novel data for resolving them. Industry is by comparison a mass of green field areas of inquiry with large budgets, minimal bureaucracy, and ample data. IMO I thought it was the opposite. Academia is filled with people going out of their way to do something "novel", even if it's useless and/or over-complicated. Because a) that's how you get papers, and b) moreover most PhD programs literally require you to make a novel discovery to graduate. Case in point: all those theory papers with weird techniques, limited use cases, and demos which barely work; any "game" made by academics. In contrast, industry has a ton of resources, but they don't like allocating them to anything which isn't expected to make a project. Most industries are just "new" approaches to old problems which are really just improvements. Industries use tried-and-true tools and technologies, and don't use the theoretical cutting-edge stuff until enough research is done and tools are created that it's no longer cutting-edge (e.g. linear types in Rust). Case in point: another ride-sharing app, database-management tool, Twitter introducing medium-style notes, Dropbox introducing Patreon-like pay-for-access, AAA games. This is a pessimistic take: there are plenty of academics who try to work on truly practical problems even if there's not much "novelty", and startups who work to create something radically new. And then there's corporate research labs like Microsoft Research whose goal is essentially to make stuff that's a) novel and b) practical. But those fourty-year-old problems and techniques you learned in undergrad? Those aren't what you're working on once you get into a PhD. And I would not paint industry as "minimal bureaucracy", maybe some industries but definitely not FAANG.