> Why not?

Truth is that the work and complexity is not that divorced. Honestly, the work in academia felt harder, though more fulfilling. Industry work hasn't made me have to really think deeply. If anything, I've heard most of my coworkers (at multiple companies) say something along the lines of "we have to move so fast that there's no time to think." Given that (multiple) managers tell me I'm "too slow" just because I'm not producing tons of lines of code (I'm neck and neck with everyone on milestones), I understand what they're talking about. Industry has a working mode of "do first, think second" while academia often thinks first. The reason is really because it is a lot cheaper to think first.

[0] It works enough for some demo to some person

[1] One example is I beat a company's fancy giant transformer based image detector with a scrappy CNN that took only a few hours to train. They were excited for all of 1 day and then wouldn't let me do the same thing to the transformer model (which would have had a bigger impact). Fun fact, my boss also loved to tell me about how dumb academia is because they never do anything useful and how industry makes all the real advancements.

Biotech and academia have very different standards for data quality and reproducibility. Most of the biotech people I know view academic research as an interesting first draft at best.

Drug development is just a totally different game. The tools are the same but the difference between what the reviewers at your favorite high impact publication want and what the FDA wants are pretty different. People spend their whole careers getting good at the latter in the same way people get good at the former. I've seen people come from academia and thrive and I've also seen the struggle. Some people also go to school with the goal of doing drug development, which sometimes academic folks don't realize. - person who was good at microscope and ended up in early stage drug development ~10y

I can’t speak to this particular sector; however, I have found academics to lag 5-7y behind the realities of the business world I operate in.

Business moves incredibly fast; academia, not so much.

Because the results from an acedemic paper are not, ever, going to be injected into a customer's arm. Developing products for sale in the real world is very different than designing lab experiments.

Academics do have a reputation that way, but only the 100% safe, tenured ones. The majority of academics are required to have a strong level of communication just to get their grants accepted. Imagine if, on top of working your normal job at maximum efficiency, you then had to make a presentation to the government every year about why you and everyone that depends upon you deserves to eat, while the government you make the presentation to becomes increasingly antagonistic and detached.

There's quite a lot of people skills involved in surviving as an academic in today's environment. Imagine if you had to teach calculus to 150 random, uninterested teenagers (barely adults) every 12 weeks. There's some serious people skills involved in doing a good job at that (most people do actually try to teach well, I've known multiple people this year refused tenure based on rate-my-teacher ratings).

It's a different set of skills for sure, but being an academic isn't as socially challenged as the zeitgeist appears to believe.

Academic's, FTR, have to have a huge amount of people skills. Their job isn't just to discover, it's to share.

You cannot share (effectively) if you cannot communicate in a way that others can understand.

Further the entire ecosystem that academics rely on to get what they need to do for their research (grants, and other funding, resources, and so on) necessitate them to convince people who control those, who do not necessarily understand the purpose of the work

When interest rates are low, capital is willing to go to riskier enterprises like biotech in order to get a larger return compared to the alternatives.

When interest rates are high, capital shifts to yield-generating, interest-bearing investments. They give higher returns with less risk.

So basically the ROI of biotech becomes less competitive compared to alternatives. You have the same number of people/firms chasing a smaller supply of investment dollars.