I had always wanted to be a university professor. I do a ton of practical algorithmic research in the course of personal and professional software development.

I had always wanted to be a university professor. I do a ton of practical algorithmic research in the course of personal and professional software development. I love teaching and tutoring. I love definitively and completely solving hard problems with new solutions. I love devising proven partial solutions when that's not feasible, and looking forward to the rest. When I get a bug up my nose about a problem, I do not rest until it's solved, and solved properly. It's probably around 15 years ago when I had my own realization that success in academia is driven primarily by publishing metrics. Since that's the reward mechanism, academia has optimized for that case above all else. As the article lists, only the current hot topics for publishing get any authorization or funding, so who knows what you'd actually be working on. And whatever you're working on demands _everything_ you have to avoid failure. Beyond that level of graduate indentured servant, it's all posturing and politics, still chasing the hot publishing topics. I have been able to work on projects that map well to sub-problems of my long term interest field. Hobby and work blends nicely. I love what I do. While I'm not yet reaping significantly financially, I do what I want and do not have the stress and crunch of either academic process or a soul-sucking job, and that was my tradeoff to decide. I still have unbounded financial potential as a business owner and curator of ground-breaking technologies. But I also know that technical merit does not equate to success in the market; that's another set of skills, and its own challenging industry.