Our academic gets tired of terrible wages and thinks “I’ll do a tour of duty at a tech company and pay off my mortgage.” They arrive and freak out because the incentives are totally different. They spend their days trying to replicate the vibe of graduate seminars or R&D projects (e.g. “hey everyone, let’s explore type systems!”), but the working developers around them are not buying it. They rant and rave about how they can’t get approval to publish this or that IP. Oh, and it turns out their coding skills are below that of the incoming junior engineers who they used to teach.
Ultimately they fail to make any impact, so their project is cancelled — an indignity which they would never experience at uni. So they leave, but during that 1-2 year adventure they have been paid 10x they would have made at a university.
And now they can return to academia having paid off some debts and with a shiny entry on their resume that says they have Real World experience at a BigCo.
Again, that’s not everyone, and I sort of rolled all the bad problems into one scenario. But I have seen it many times - just last month I watched a team of academics get torn down due to this type of square-peg-round-hole mismatch.
Oh my God, I laughed way too hard.