Professionals screw up their jobs more than academics for the same reason that professional baseball players strike out more than couch surfers: they’re actually playing the game

You don't know that--it's possible (and in my experience this is the more likely cause) that they are not thinking enough on the abstract to recognize patterns across situations, which is why they keep making the same mistakes.

The best professionals I've ever worked with don't even bother making this artificial distinction between professional practice and the academe, and instead continue to educate themselves even as they get farther in their careers. Professionals who are incapable of elevating their practice into theory are just as devoid of knowledge as academics who don't put their theory into practice. We need to stop glorifying this notion of "pure" professionals just as people are skeptical of "pure" academics--otherwise this is just letting anti-intellectualism creep in on HN.

There is no ant—intellectualism here. Academics simply are not professionals. You can’t suddenly become good at something you don’t practice because you are a master at theory and being an academic doesn’t allow the time to practice.

This. It's one thing to know the theory of digging trenches, it's another to successfully fight from them.

Sorry if my joke came across as anti-intellectual. I think "law professor" and "lawyer" are really different jobs, though, in the same way a doctor does a different job from a PhD in medicine. Sure, those "head of research" MD-PhD folks running research labs are technically doctors, but you don't want them to be your doctor simply for the reason that they haven't actually seen any patients in a long time.

Industry and academia are totally different environments. I don’t see any indication that people in industry “screw up their jobs” more than academics. How do you even define “screw up” and “more?”

The academic’s job is to understand the state of the art well enough to improve on it, implementing a standard solution is below bare minimum.

In industry the goal is to get near enough an approximation to the state of the art such that the thing they are working on doesn’t provide the company a noticeable disadvantage vs the competition, and then move on to something else.

It's extremely common for many scientists (nuclear physicists, neuroscientists, biochemists, etc.) to spend a few years in the industry and either teach for a while or publish a paper on the side and then come back to full-time work when they feel like it again. This obsession on drawing a hard line between the two is utter nonsense and reeks of classic HN techbro simple-mindedness. You would easily make the mistake of dismissing a professional in the middle of an academic stint as someone who has no experience at all, just to feed your sense of self-superiority.

Err, did you mean to respond to a different post? I was pointing out that the jobs (not the people) are fundamentally different. As a result, denigrating academics for not “playing the game” makes no sense. They are “playing” a different “game.”

It is like complaining that Wayne Gretzky sucked at getting points — compare his scores to, like, any vaguely offense-focused basketball player!

In this description, who is building what you call "state of the art"?

It's because academics are spectacularly incompetent compared to professionals.

They have no actual practice doing anything. But worse, they think they know what they're doing.

Honestly, be thankful you've never worked with an academic, they're honestly the worst work experience you will ever have, arrogant, utterly incompetent and can waste huge amounts of your time by saying intellectually appealing things to management that are a practical disaster.

There is a good reason for spherical cow in vacuum to exist as a concept.

I have seen brilliant people pass through CS with flying colors and they enter their first job and don't know how to debug something.

Think of it that way - a material science professor will know everything there is about welding. And yet probably for a complex weld you will call a welder. Tricks of the trade matter.

The whole point of the academy is that you can abstract a bit the whole messiness of the world so you can focus on the grander things.