> You seem to, maybe fairly, denigrate startups and industry in general as well as academia.
Yeah, this is exactly why I changed my mind halfway through that long post :-).
I honestly love the startup environment. I'd much rather work in start-up than a large company. What I do denigrate is starting up for the sake of starting up. Finding an (often otherwise legitimate) need, pounding at it for six months while it's still hot, and coming up with a technologically half-assed product to sell for a reasonable price.
This is, in my opinion, destructive both intellectually and technologically. It teaches bad habits and gives little time to learn both adequate technologies and the fundamentals of their trade to programmers. I'd be a very rich man if I had a penny every time I told a colleague who was enthusiastic about a new technology he'd discovered on kickstarter or here on HN that or had this. You know something is wrong when so many new things are so similar to old things -- so similar to the point that they repeat the mistakes.
As for academia, I still keep in touch with some of the people I worked with there. It's the most intellectually stimulating place I've ever worked in, and contrary to popular belief, one of the most refreshing feelings a professional can have is walk into a roomfull of people and realize they're the dumbest in there. I miss being the dumbest man in the room.
> What should an intelligent person do?
I honestly have no idea.
> What did you settle on?
I didn't settle yet, but if I were to look back, I'd say what I'm doing now is better than what I had back then.
Now I'm working for a large-ish company. Their business is entirely software, but they want to start doing hardware and they brought me in to help. They pay me well and I can come in the office at 10 AM, which is good (I have some sleep issues). The work itself is shit; there's a long ladder of managers who are increasingly clueless about what embedded development means, but each of them has to deliver results (no matter how irrelevant) because they made promises. Consequently, most of what I do is pointless, but not entirely uninteresting. In the last month or so, I dabbled in a USB driver in the Linux kernel, hacked on an HTTP proxy, helped a colleague build a PCB... it's useless, but not entirely devoid of fun. I intend to leave as soon as someplace where they actually need me to build stuff, not massage egos, shows up, but until then, I can bear it.
That being said, it also leaves me enough free time to do some hacking of my own, enough time for my hobbies, enough time for family and friends. I have enough time to brew beer with my girlfriend, read whatever books I want, learn Go and post crap on Hackernews. I'm far more unhappy with what I do than I was in university, but overall, I'm a happy person.