Tenured, Trapped, and Miserable

Unrelated to humanities, I have interacted with a large number of CS professors (in DS/ML to be specific), many who have no idea how to bring their nascent ideas to production or some sort of preview. Their research lives and dies on graphs & pretty PDFs for conferences. This is a serious problem & not exactly US specific. And honestly, it is pushed under the rug every single time.

The usual excuses that I find are handwaving, delegating to graduate students or 'left as an exercise to the interested'. As an ex-academic, I feel creating something is only part of the job. Making it usable is another beast.

Say for e.g. building an amazing StyleGAN to synthesize novel images. If you can't connect it to appspot/netlify - you are at the mercy of notebooks on Google Colab runtimes to demonstrate your work. Bringing a project to life also touches on several important factors - how to make users connect their own data, schema, preserving compute or bandwidth etc. Each of them is a small engineering optimization challenge by itself, which effectively also draws out lacunae in the research idea as a bonus.

I find it appalling and sad that a large number of tenured academics in CS will have no idea how to get something working end to end, while professing they are making you 'learn to fish rather than feeding you'.

If decades of training leave you unprepared to do a single job that someone is willing to pay you decent money to do, you should seriously evaluate the validity of what you have been studying.

Which totally matches up with the utter nonsense I hear every time I hear about what someone is researching in the academic humanities.

It's quite depressing to compare the amount of tenured professors dissatisfied with their jobs and doing meaningless work (according to them) , who keep the positions occupied in relation to the amount of students studying the Humanities and not having a chance to be employed in their field of study. Potential new ideas and potential get thrown away, so that some people can keep their status quo and at the same time they complain about having unfulfilling jobs.