An observation from within the system: A year or so ago I completed a PhD in theoretical high energy physics. I did that after working for about 5 years outsid

An observation from within the system: A year or so ago I completed a PhD in theoretical high energy physics. I did that after working for about 5 years outside of academia [the reasons for that were financial issues in my family]. Because of this hiatus (I suppose) and the fact that I had troubles getting reference letters (my master thesis advisor passed away at quite a young age right at the time when I tried to start applying for positions; we actually agreed to meet in person to discuss next steps but the meeting never happened) I had issues getting accepted into PhD programs and I ended up with an offer from a rather weak institution in my home country (which is in EU). I had no other options to choose from (and I could not wait another year) so I accepted. However, I also looked at the publishing record of the team that I was about to join. Their works did not seem stellar (and I did not expect that) but they seemed to publish regularly, on several topics, and with several collaborating institutions. When I started I quickly realized that the knowledge/expertise level was much lower than I expected (and I did not expect too much). The group consisted of the group leader and three senior researchers, and I am pretty sure that my knowledge of QFT when I *started* working with them was the best in the group. (Now, I had studied in my own time during some part of the years I was outside of academia, and I think my knowledge at that time exceeded that of an average 1st year hep-theory PhD student in Europe, but it was also nothing spectacular; definitely not what I would call "competent"; which is admittedly a high bar in quantum field theory / hep theory, but something I would expect senior researchers to more or less satisfy.) I realized that the one topic on which the group was publishing on their own was just a continual rehash of the same thing (applied to various different problems, so perhaps not completely useless) and the other topics, those which seemed more advanced when I originally looked at the publication record, were all done essentially outside the group by other people. The group members contributed with some non-essential help (often resembling a work done by a student, such as finalizing a manuscript or double checking calculations) or with nothing; and were added as coauthors due to some other reasons (I suppose: past loyalties, friend groups, advantage of having foreign or external institution co-authors). [Note: I was not included into any of those collaborations so I am not speaking with a full knowledge of the inner workings there.] During this time I saw that people being added as coauthors had a very noisy relation to what they did or didn't do on any given paper. I was added as a co-author on a paper that I made essentially no work on [not fair], I was added as a co-author on papers which drew upon some of my earlier results [fair, but I did not subscribe to the overall spirit of the paper or even to the paper being published at all], I was a co-author of papers where number of authors and my positions in the list roughly corresponded to my contribution [as it should be], I was a co-author of papers that were done basically by myself but there were several other co-authors included who made a little to no contribution [and the ordering of the author list was always alphabetical not reflecting the relative contribution]. There is also another aspect of this: If you are an early career researcher (PhD student, PostDoc, and even non-tenured professor) you might have a very limited control over who gets included on the publications you work on, and on what publications your name appears. In my case, I am a very disagreeable person when I think things are being done wrongly and yet I have not managed to refuse from being included on papers I did not want to be a co-author of, or to prevent people who contributed nothing to be included on my papers. [I mean the only way to achieve that meant escalating conflict into levels which (a) would likely disable any further cooperation with the group, and (b) might be even morally questionable concerning the level of distress it would make to other people who just seemed to be fine about "the normal way" things were being done.] In any case, while there are still some really good people in academia (actually the best people I met in my life were nearly all in academia), in overall (by no means fully indicated in the above paragraphs) I feel very bitter about it, and I think it is so dysfunctional and morally corrupted, that it is nearly inevitable that it collapses in future. The current and future shockwaves of the change in the public sentiment and funding, the evolution of demographics, and the consequences of AI, just hasten the process that would have probably unfolded, sooner or later, anyway.