In our talk we’ll explore this hypothesis: in industry, you are learning a technology you will use to develop software, whereas in an academic setting, you are there to learn how to learn. Based on our experience of travelling in opposite directions: Francesco from industry to academia, and Simon from a theoretical to a more pragmatic approach, we’ll test the hypothesis, and, through evidence and anecdotes, show that in fact it is more complicated and diverse than we had first imagined.