I didn’t explain my opinion as strong as I could have. In academia, your biggest problem to do great research is "publish or perish", but in industry, as an employee, your biggest problem is your company's short goals. "They buy your freedom". You can't focus on a hard problem for ten years or do research on interesting theoretical problems in industry.
>You can't focus on a hard problem for ten years or do research on interesting theoretical problems in industry.
Sure you can. You simply spend a bit of time on farming out practical applications to other teams or filling patents or writing publications. Comes out to less overhead than in academia with grants, managing students, writing papers, etc. Sure, 99.99% of industry is applied however 0.01% of a massive thing is still very large so there's plenty of non-applied work being done.
Industry is massive and painting every little piece of it with the same brush is a very unjust way of looking at it. I'd recommend you actually learn about things and talk to people before making broad generalizations about them.
There are numerous counterexamples. AI/ML is huge in industry right now, but that’s just the most visible field. Hardware manufacturers certainly have employees pushing forward the state of the art. Google regularly publishes cited research papers. Microsoft and Oracle fund a lot of academic research—I have to assume they also employ internal researchers. Industry is on the forefront of the software engineering specialization of CS (my grad school focus). I’m sure you can find plenty more examples.
10 years of focus on the same problem is definitely possible in industry, and your salary will scale with your expertise. It sounds like you’re expected to produce results along the way even in academia, so there’s not a notable difference in that regard.
One other thing worth comparing is the administrative burden. Good engineering teams have a variety of support systems in place to keep high-value engineers as productive as possible (people managers, engineering coordinators, project managers, etc.). It sounds to me like profs end up personally doing a lot of legwork.
I didn’t explain my opinion as strong as I could have. In academia, your biggest problem to do great research is "publish or perish", but in industry, as an employee, your biggest problem is your company's short goals. "They buy your freedom". You can't focus on a hard problem for ten years or do research on interesting theoretical problems in industry.