>What about negative anecdotes? Has anyone here regretted his or her decision to leave academia? Particularly, have you found the work less rewarding or interesting?

I left academia after undergrad, despite applying and getting into graduate school. My degree is in Computer Science, my specialty track was Programming Languages and Compilers, and my senior thesis was in Systems Programming Languages.

I had job offers and eventually took one. What I found was that industry is smug, deceptive, fad-driven, cares nothing for fundamental problem-solving until you pay them for it, and (of course) near-fatally infected with live-to-work-ism and the Californian Ideology.

* Smug: despite many of them having MSc degrees or being PhD drop-outs, most of the professional programmers I've met deride research itself as essentially pointless. Someone once asked me point-blank at lunch why I wanted to publish an invention/discovery of mine in a research paper, why I didn't just go found a start-up based on it. My discovery is in type theory: not exactly the most amenable field for using Ruby on Rails to pump out a "minimum viable product". Further: type-theory results are mathematical rather than empirical, the proofs have to be checked. Peer review has its just place in the world, and thus so does Research Science.

* Deceptive: many of the people I met did not know or care whether their software served its intended purpose well, or whether that purpose was a good purpose, or whether (provided it was a good purpose, which I shall note that, say, investment banking isn't) it can be served well. The hiring binge I saw was completely uncorrelated to having an actual workload for the people they wanted to hire. The idea seems to have been to hire everyone's Hackathon friends.

* Fad-driven: look at the ads for hiring "rock-stars" and "ninjas", and then realize that most of these people earning six-figure salaries just build web-sites or silly mobile applications. Who thought Groupon was a good idea (I'll note that I never did)? Why should everything be an ad-based web application to the point that things other than ad-based web applications simply don't get built that often anymore?

* Cares nothing for fundamental problem-solving: Industry is infected with marketer-thinking (trying to please a perceived primary market of investors and secondary market of customers) rather than fundamental business-thinking (building cars instead of faster horses). The industrial programmers who can possess substantial skill in fundamental Computer Science, or who solve problems in Computer Science, are a vocal but still small minority. Think of Steve Yegge and his "cat-picture problems," and remember that Steve Yegge is talking about major companies like Google and Facebook spending their energy on cat-picture problems.

* Live-to-workism and California Ideology: I was astounded and offended to find myself hearing hour-long talks between otherwise intelligent, humane and respectful coworkers on libertarianism and Austrian economics. Further, the software industry is powered by "passion" (a component of the Californian Ideology), which has mostly just become an excuse for long, unbroken workdays, fanboyish loyalty to employers/companies, and programming-centered social events outside work. The programming profession expects you to love your job, no matter what it is. Not enjoy, not like, not perform competently, love. The assumption is that if you didn't love what you were doing, you would leave. Never mind real life, where the state of one's bank account is more than just a way of keeping score, programming jobs are clustered in some of the world's most expensive metro-areas, people have families, and they may have moved to enter their programming job.

I'm not quite back in academia yet (only admitted to one graduate school so far, with non-guaranteed funding, two other applications still pending), but I'll be damned happier when I get back there. And of course, unbias this anecdote by accounting for its kvetchiness and negativity, because you asked for a negative opinion about industry.