> Is this what you meant by answering to lots of people, or something else? Yes, this is what I meant. I dropped out of my PhD (CS as well), but when I was a s

> Is this what you meant by answering to lots of people, or something else? Yes, this is what I meant. I dropped out of my PhD (CS as well), but when I was a student my advisor (who was still an assistant professor at the time) was spending most of his waking hours in department meetings, writing grants, finding a way to make $RANDOM_OLD_PROFESSOR happy, and so on. To me it seemed very much like he had 10 million voices telling him what to do (of course he got to choose what he would actually do and what he wouldn't, but it didn't feel to me like he was much more "free" than he would have been in an industry job).