Academia, especially in the US and Canada, only has one viable long-term job: a faculty position. Everything else is ostensibly “training” for that job and there’s increasing pressure to make that transition as quickly as possible, in part because the low pay and stability of the other positions.
This is stupid. Since professors produce trainees, the competition gets exponentially worse. At the same time, using mostly new workers that are constantly churning over makes it hard to do good research. This is exacerbated by the emphasis on first/last author publications, which disincentivizes division of labor and teamwork. Furthermore, studies have found that outcome for the trainees are better when a mix of senior people are around.
Despite this, the NIH funds virtually no staff scientists: only one institute (NCI) has a staff scientist mechanism and it’s very small (~50?) compared to the rest of the program. Give people longer contracts (5 years) renewable bases on the output of the teams they enable, and everyone would win.