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 incentiv

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.