If you're doing industry-relevant research and you're in academia, leave. Your work can be supported by corporate profits because it is in essence for corporate profit. Get a job in industry, make more money, and make room for academics who want to do honest-to-god academics and work on theory or fundamental research. Or who want to do research relevant to improving society, not improving profit margins.
There aren't that many professor jobs out there. It's unbelievably greedy to be taking one up to do industry's dirty work.
You can always take an afternoon off a semester here and there to be an adjunct and teach a SE class or give a guest lecture.
Oh, my toosh, no. I don't agree with everything Matt said, but on this, you're totally off. I try pretty hard to do research that is (a) potentially industry-relevant (key word: potentially); and that (b) industry won't do for various reasons. Thus far, it's seemed to work pretty well. Using my favorite example of the week, take some of our work on cuckoo hashing -- it's contributed quite a bit to the literature of how to implement fast cuckoo hashes, contributed a new and fairly intriguing data structure for approximate set membership, and produced a design that I know to be in use in two Very Large Companies(tm).
The companies wouldn't have done this work, at least outside of their research labs, because the solution's theory is too far from the need of any one problem. But the result -- a more memory-efficient hash table design -- turns out to be broadly useful.
And yes, I do consider this to be "industry-relevant" research. I'm not going to solve their problems for them -- but there can be great synergies between industry and academia for having broad impact through adoption.
(full disclosure: I'm an academic on sabbatical at Google for the year. It's likely I'm a little biased in my belief that both have value. But this isn't a bias unique to me; systems as a general area is close to industry, and most of my colleagues rotate in and out of industry periodically via sabbaticals or startups.)
I don't agree with this at all. The partnership between industry and academia is long-standing and has proven to be extremely valuable -- much of the Internet came about because of it.
At this point it's not a 'partnership' -- industry has co-opted and taken over academia to a startling and troubling extent. Universities are expected to pump out software engineers trained in industry best practice, not thinkers and theorists, and woe betide any school that doesn't toe the line. Research is pushed towards corporate interests as requested in this article here and people just give up. As public research is defunded corporate money has to fill in, which forces academics to make some noises about "applications" or "industry" when they write their papers in hopes of more funding. In any paper, no matter how theoretical, you can make it sound like it has "applications". If someone published the halting problem today, the first half of the abstract would be "as industry deals with more and more complex programs and terabytes of data that are distributed as services in the cloud, we need to understand if there are limits to what we can compute. We present an argument that there are limits, and describe some practical applications".
Many capitulate altogether, trying to do industry work from their academic position. It is these last people who should get out.
The creation of the internet worked wonderfully. It was invented by academics based on government grants when it was basic research, and then refined and turned into something practical and workable and, most importantly, profitable, by industry. Exactly as it's supposed to be.
There aren't that many professor jobs out there. It's unbelievably greedy to be taking one up to do industry's dirty work.
You can always take an afternoon off a semester here and there to be an adjunct and teach a SE class or give a guest lecture.