but that's still very different from working for, say, an architecture company, where the hours you put in directly translate into what you company can bill your client. so in a "real job" your hours can be specifically counted in monetary units, and even if you're part of the overhead, you're still helping the company work well and make money. whereas in an academia job, even if you get private capital, you usually count things in terms of results (like solving equations or getting a piece of code to work). your work does not "make money"... so you're not as likely to get rich writing string theory as you are coding microsoft excel.