Yeah, that doesn't fit my experience either. I meet plenty of people with PhDs who aren't in academia but who are perfectly well respected by academics. Many of them still do research and come to conferences, too, because in CS many industry labs also publish research papers [1]. Some of those jobs are more respected than academic positions are, even among academics. For example, Pixar employees are bigger big-shots at SIGGRAPH than just about any academics are.
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Yeah, that doesn't fit my experience either. I meet plenty of people with PhDs who aren't in academia but who are perfectly well respected by academics. Many of them still do research and come to conferences, too, because in CS many industry labs also publish research papers [1]. Some of those jobs are more respected than academic positions are, even among academics. For example, Pixar employees are bigger big-shots at SIGGRAPH than just about any academics are.
[1] Example: http://research.google.com/pubs/papers.html