The conveniences and cultural differences of the CS community are a stark contrast to academic biology. Considering the author's observations:
First, the opt-out options are often fewer and further between; making the jump between basic science work and industrial biotech/pharma can be very difficult depending on your area of interest.
Then, as a biologist, it can be incredibly difficult to restrict your working hours, as experimental (e.g. cell culture) work can operate with delays or intervals. Stepping out at the wrong time means your cells die.
Beyond the unpredictable timing, there's more uncertainty around whether experiments will physically work, and it can be nigh impossible engineer your way out of certain failures.
Further, the benchmarks for "contribution to the field" in biology can be extremely unforgiving; publishing papers in journals outside of Nature, Science, or Cell fails to paint a compelling picture.
These things are added on to the things pointed out in the piece. Extra hurdles.
That's not to say that biological science fields are evil or that faculty paths are never worth considering. But having worked in the lab of a junior faculty member, you can see the pressure and challenges.
That's where personnel management comes in. I've got an undergrad intern at the moment, who has only a modest amount of lab research experience. In a month and a half, I've taught him molecular biology from scratch (beginning with the fundamentals of PCR) and from what i taught him, I gave him a list of 48 mutations. He designed primers to make those mutations, does the molecular biology, checks the sequences, then does the biochemical experiment on the enzyme that's being mutated. He's finished about half of the mutants. We are able to get this done because the experiments were planned out to be paralellizable and scaleable, and if something is finishing up when it needs to be picked up at the end of the day (like a transformation recovery), I do it, because he comes in early and I stay in late. I also drop in on the weekends to start cultures- but usually only briefly -, to make the most efficient use of his and my time. He is in usually around 9:00-9:15 and I make sure he leaves at 5:00 and I really get angry if he's around past 5:15 except in exigent conditions.
Bottom line: Even in Biology, you can restrict your working hours if you're a team player if you have good management skills.
If you're overworking. Since science entails failure that you cannot engineer your way out of - you will wind up burning out, since the working hard followed by failure is exactly an optimal way of conditioning laziness.
I think there are certainly organizational things that can be done to facilitate more reasonable working hours, and I've seen this done well in industrial settings. From pipelined experiments to working with automation, technicians, and teammates.
With all that said, it's not easy, especially as a junior faculty member with limited resources. Building a sane lab environment is 100% worth it IMO, but it is challenging and comes with a few perceived compromises.
Every science has it's own merits and problems and we CS people do not only sit on the couch and drink coffee before we hit back on some brogramming and getting the next 10^9$ from Facebook.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fl4L4M8m4d0
Talk about stress.
I wouldn't say that many people see it as attractive relative to high-degree-of-freedom research positions in industry, but there just aren't that many such positions in industry. And, you often have to build up a reputation in academia first (as you did) before you can jump to an industry position that is senior enough to give you research & publication freedom. Even then there are only a handful of options; MSR and parts of Google are two of them in CS, and the numbers dwindle considerably if you look outside of CS. If MSR hired many more people straight out of grad school, and in a broader range of fields, I'm sure many grad students would consider that option rather than pursuing a tenure-track faculty position. Back in the Bell Labs days, it was a popular top choice out of grad school, with faculty job being a second choice.
If you relax the requirement that the job has to let you regularly talk about and publish the results of your research, there are more industry positions available, like R&D positions at petrochemical and aerospace firms. They have large R&D arms, but the average employee in them will publish little to none, except whatever ends up being published via patent filings. That can be a good choice (I have some acquaintances who work in R&D at BP and like their job), but a research career where you can't publish is a quite different choice of career.
As a more minor working-conditions point, I personally like the flexibility. I typically spend 3 days a week in my office and 2 days working off-campus, which most companies won't let you do. And if I want to take a 3-day weekend trip somewhere, I can just do it, as long as it doesn't interfere with a day on which I have classes; no need to ask for permission in advance or worry about how many vacation days I have.
> Given this I fail to understand why being a professor remains such an attractive career path.
I know a lot of students who made the very concrete decision between immediate grad school, a job followed by grad school, only a job, self-employment, self-teaching, vacation, etc. Guys and girls.
All I learned is everyone's different.