Many similar problems exist in most fields of academia. Biology has an even worse academic environment IMO, but unless you are highly computational it's not as

Many similar problems exist in most fields of academia. Biology has an even worse academic environment IMO, but unless you are highly computational it's not as easy to sell out to industry. Yeah there's pharma, but the straight out of PhD salaries aren't that exciting and the work environment is generally not as good as tech. Not disagreeing with you at all on the CS front though obviously. I am interested to see how things go in the next few decades in the respective fields, as the ease of exit does affect who stays as you mention. But it also affects who joins in the first place, the pressure felt to get results, and hopefully down the road systemic incentive to fix the problems. CS also has the perk of being easier to rejoin - you don't need to make a huge initial investment in most researchers to give them a chance. So I'm optimistic for reform in CS academia down the road. But it's a long road, and if academic politics continue to prevail then I'm deeply concerned about the state of all of our research institutions. Seriously, I was recently at reunions for a "top" university where many people go into graduate programs, and it became a running joke trying to find an alum from any PhD program that wasn't jaded as fuck. Even some of the people that I was most confident would be killing it weren't (or at least felt they weren't). The majority were actively exploring industry opportunities and considered themselves unlikely to do an academic postdoc.