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.
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.