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Another way to put this is that the incentives in academia right now encourage "careerism", for lack of a better term. People have to put so much effort into m

Another way to put this is that the incentives in academia right now encourage "careerism", for lack of a better term. People have to put so much effort into maintaining their position that the actually big picture goals like research become difficult to do, especially when you have to show progress every quarter and funding is only given out in one to two year increments. Researchers end up playing it safe, because big risky ideas may pay off in five to ten years, but that kind of research is hard to fund on a yearly or even quarterly basis.

opportune 3y ago
This. The other problem is that as academia becomes a careerist pressure cooker of competition, where the actual science takes a back burner and you’re incentivized to churn out high-likelihood-to-succeed but not-actually-profound science… why even go into academia? Personally, I’d have loved to be a part of the Academia of the mid 20th century. But my exposure to research 10 years ago (thankfully, before committing to a PhD) quickly taught me that it’d be extremely unfulfilling, difficult, and poorly compensated compared to private industry. It would be cool to be a tenured professor I guess, but the coolness and prestige of that title is riding the coattails of the past when academia was less of a slog. I get to work on novel CS problems (distributed systems) in my FAANG job without having to publish X papers per year while I progress on the actual meaty problems, for a lot more pay. It’s just strictly better IMO. I’d rather take 3 years from beginning to end to finish something new I’m actually proud of that’ll be used by hundred of millions of people, than be forced to publish papers very few people will read at a regular cadence or lose my job.