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Of course everything you say about the software industry is true, right down to the "libertarianism and Austrian economics" (I take it you prefer critical race theory and postcolonial studies).Why would I prefer that bunch of idiot hippies? My preference is for Karl Marx and Henry George (with the former being better at seeing what capitalism really is, and the latter being the better economist).
>Your problem seems to be that you haven't considered the possibility that academia is even worse. Academia is even worse. (I dropped out of the Berkeley PhD program in 1992 - specialty, OS and languages. From what I can tell, academia has only gotten worse since then.)
This is precisely what I was considering at the end of undergrad. Hell, I'm in basically the same specialty as you were.
>Even if you want to be a bureaucrat, there's no guarantee that you'll be good at it. Good bureaucrats don't write posts like the one you just wrote. They don't antagonize anyone, ever, in any way. They would rather lie - and they do. Are you good at that?
Cool story, bro. Do you think I didn't consider the office-political implications of what I wrote?
* Most academics don't read Hacker News.
* Most academics would perceive this as on their side.
* I openly admit that I wrote the post not even with mere bias but with an active bent towards an overly-negative portrayal of reality.
* Most start-up folks here on Hacker News don't necessarily agree in whole, but agree in part. I've seen Steve Yegge's speech referenced a disturbing number of times on Reddit and HN.
* Most of the votes have been upvotes, indicating a perception that the discussion is worth having rather than storming off in a huff and blacklisting the offending poster.
>You think someone is going to fund you just because you're smart and have cool ideas?
No, I thought someone was going to fund me because my adviser is well-known and prestigious within the field. There's no point breeding inferior academic DNA into myself, is there?
>Otherwise, the simplest way to do the kind of research you want to do is to decide quite consciously to give yourself over to the salt-mining industry in the most mercenary possible way, spend a decade making as much money as you possibly can (and spending as little as you can), and (if you succeed) found your own little university of one. It's not Victorian science, either, but I'll tell you it's a lot closer than Berkeley.
For my field I never even saw any point in applying to Berkeley, but how do you propose to go about this? Even the successful industrial programmers I know, unless they became millionaires off a start-up, did not actually make enough money to "settle down" out of working and "found your own little university of one."
Provided you had the cash, it does sound like a fine idea.