Although I'm not sure whether I'll stay in it, I haven't found CS academia as bad as the stories about Big Science academia. At least, if you look for a job out

Although I'm not sure whether I'll stay in it, I haven't found CS academia as bad as the stories about Big Science academia. At least, if you look for a job outside the top-20 "R1" schools, which are more focused on big labs and big grants to support those labs. Industry hires away a lot of PhDs, and there are a lot of small to medium-sized CS departments, both of which improve the supply/demand situation and working conditions compared to areas like biology and physics. Things in parts of Europe are even better (which is why I took a professorship in Denmark out of grad school, rather than in the US), but there are a lot of small CS departments in the US where you can work on your research without having an insane life. It does require that you have the kind of research that doesn't need huge funding and huge labs (if you need >$1m/yr budgets, you more or less have to be at an R1 and play that game). And you should at least somewhat like teaching. But if those things are true it can be an ok job with some freedom to decide what to work on. And the odds of getting a tenured position at a smaller school aren't 1000:1 like trying to get to be a tenured prof at MIT.