As an academic myself I can somehow relate with Colin sentiment, not all work that is done in academia is impactful and/or novel, and indeed the current system

As an academic myself I can somehow relate with Colin sentiment, not all work that is done in academia is impactful and/or novel, and indeed the current system rewards small incremental improvements rather than working on challenging problems. However, I feel that there is academia and academia. I am lucky enough to: a) work with a supervisor that, during my PhD, encouraged me to ignore, and sometimes even challenge, the consensus view of the research community on the topic, believing that there's always more than one way to do things.; b) live in a country were universities are still mostly state-founded and so I do not need to constantly be hunting for grants. Of course, there are compromises. I do have to spend some of my time on projects/papers that I hardly believe will ever have an impact outside of the academic world but that is pretty much the same as having to manage servers and customers, as long as it leaves me enough time to work on projects/papers that I enjoy. Finally, I do believe that "small incremental improvements" is not the only way to do earn a living in academia. Being curiosity-driven, I consider myself more of a "generalist" rather than a "specialist" and I've been investigating rather diverse topics (e.g., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22678471 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22678471 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24361852 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24361852). As I only have been doing this for a few years I have no idea whether my work will eventually be considered relevant enough to earn me a permanent position, but so far it has been quite well received by the academic community and I had no troubles in publishing it.