Perhaps the meta lesson is we massively overproduce academics, making the stakes and competition insane. In the cutthroat world of academic soft sciences you'r

Perhaps the meta lesson is we massively overproduce academics, making the stakes and competition insane. In the cutthroat world of academic soft sciences you're not getting tenure unless you make a breakthru and you're allowed zero mistakes. Its up or out. She made her one mistake, and she's out. And there's 10, 50, 5000 people equally qualified without opportunity to cheer on her demise. One of hundreds or thousands of equally qualified researchers now gets a chance at tenure, good for them bad for her. On the other hand in the commercial software development world, we usually don't blacklist software devs from the field after their first bug because 1) we're low on supplies of software devs plus or minus propaganda, at least we don't have the excess of her field 2) the experience of having a software bug makes a better dev. You can't expect non-pathological behavior from a pathological situation. Until the supply/demand hiring issues in academia are fixed, stories about academia are going to read like an insane elementary school playground version of Lord of the Flies. You can't produce 10 to 100 times as much product (new grads) as the market can adsorb without behavior for the few good positions being viciously cutthroat and extremely dramatic.