This has been my experience with academia also. I have an MBA (gasp!) and the best profs were the ones who had real world experience.

Despite the common rhetoric you see in HN comments about how MBA programs only teach graduates how to cut costs by enshittifying, I actually found it a great education that made me a better engineer.

Anyway,

The best profs were the ones who'd worked in industry. One guy who taught finance worked on Wall Street and was fond of distinguishing between how the textbook taught a particular technique or fact, and how practitioners actually do it in real life. Got taught startup valuation by a guy who'd been a VC, competitive strategy by a guy who was a strategy consultant for companies you'd actually heard of, etc.

The worst profs were the ones like the guy who taught operations. He'd never worked a real job. Went straight from being a student to being a TA to a postdoc to a "research prof", whatever that means. All his examples and case studies were useless or overly simplistic to the point of being useless.

The fact that TFAuthor is concerned with polishing one's craft shows they're completely divorced from what actually happens outside the ivory tower. Typing code into a buffer has never been the hard part.