I can relate to what the author is saying. I stopped my PhD program after having completed all coursework, and right as I was beginning the work on my dissertation. I had a great pair of professors as my main advisors, who frankly asked "Why? Why are you pursuing this PhD?". My answer was that I felt that I would enjoy and thrive doing "pure research". Their feedback was very honest and frank: "but we hardly ever get to do any pure research". They went on about faculty politics, hours spent writing grant proposals, hustling to get published, ..., and how teaching students is actually a pain (if one really wanted to do research) after a relatively short time.
That was 1993, and the exploding new world of opportunities in working on _actual_ distributed systems (my dissertation topic area) in the newly forming "Internet Era" were real and exciting. Those opportunities, juxtaposed with my advisors' depictions of academia, made the choice easier. I felt very grateful to get such honest insight. For years I wondered/worried if I would regret abandoning all the work I had done, and it felt uncomfortable having not finished a goal I had set. By 10 years after, though, I had no regrets or worries remaining.
That was 1993, and the exploding new world of opportunities in working on _actual_ distributed systems (my dissertation topic area) in the newly forming "Internet Era" were real and exciting. Those opportunities, juxtaposed with my advisors' depictions of academia, made the choice easier. I felt very grateful to get such honest insight. For years I wondered/worried if I would regret abandoning all the work I had done, and it felt uncomfortable having not finished a goal I had set. By 10 years after, though, I had no regrets or worries remaining.