There are a reasonable number of people in my area (mostly, game AI and AI-for-game-design) who either left academia, or never were in it, but still attend conf

There are a reasonable number of people in my area (mostly, game AI and AI-for-game-design) who either left academia, or never were in it, but still attend conferences and publish papers. Those outside academia typically publish a bit less, mostly due to either having day jobs or pretty booked consulting careers (and in a few cases, due to secretive employers restricting what they can publish). But many are still actively involved in conferences like http://www.aiide.org http://www.aiide.org. It doesn't seem mostly billed as "escaping" or "rebelling", though. Just, some people find different careers more attractive. Some people would hate some of the bullshit involved in academia but find consulting attractive; other people would hate some of the bullshit involved in consulting but find an academic job attractive; and other people do something else entirely, like working at Electronic Arts. People end choosing a pretty wide range of different careers, all with tradeoffs. Some people choose more than one! If anything, kind of amusingly, the narrative is a bit more frequent in the other direction: people who had a senior job at a big game company and "rebelled" or "escaped" by quitting the six-figure job and going back to school for a PhD. For example, the AI lead on No One Lives Forever 2 and F.E.A.R. left the AAA game industry to get a PhD... and now is leaving academia again to go back into the game industry, but as an indie (http://web.media.mit.edu/~jorkin/ http://web.media.mit.edu/~jorkin/). I get the impression a lot of applied CS has those kinds of dynamics. If you go to a systems, graphics, data-mining, etc. conference, there's a good mix of big-company, freelance, and academic people, and a number of people who've worn more than one of those hats.