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Comment by eli_gottlieb | Hacker News Reader

You know, we used to have institutions for well-paid knowledge workers to cloister themselves from outside concerns and devote themselves to work. We called them "universities".

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It really is a shame that modern academia has broken the promise of what it used to be, and what it still (often falsely) claims to be. With so many prospective academics and so few tenured positions, academia becomes a cutthroat fight to accumulate more publications at whatever cost in order to build up one's career. Lack of funding sources leads to many people fighting over a shrinking piece of the pie. Those who are funding give initial funding to multiple groups with the goal of continuing funding whoever is most impressive -- everyone wants a good return on their investment. As a result, there's a tendency to only focus on the next progress report, focusing on short term results that are visible and can get media attention. This leads to a focus on salesmanship and less on actually figuring things out.

Academia had a specific set of pros and cons that made it a distinct entity from industry. As time as passed, academia has been taking on more and more of the cons of industry (focus on short-term thinking) without taking on the pros of industry (higher pay).

Exactly, many modern universities (even top 10 ones) are sadly quite broken. Extremely inefficient usage of funds, loads of bureaucrats for no good reason, and loads of people that just optimize for number of papers. These tend to stick around doing politics to get their names well-placed in the paper du jour, despite not having done much for it.

Math, and to a lesser extent physics & CS departments are less broken. But applied sciences places where I have been tend to be a trainwreck.

Bureaucracy, specifically the political-correctness-supporting bureaucracy is out of control in the Ivy League.

It is pretty much everywhere.

Related to this, great article of E.W.Dijkstra: The strengths of the academic enterprise (https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD11xx/E...)

I heard some of those knowledge workers even went out into the broader industry and started highly successful businesses! I wonder how they feel about what started their careers, today...

Are we still talking about college professors?

"Well paid"? Not so much.

Looking strictly at salary maybe not, but the entire package of benefits, retirement, paid time off, near-impossibility of being fired, etc. is far from the worst.

I heard a manager at Google admit that he gave the shittiest work to state-school grads, not because they were less capable (they weren't, and he admitted as much) but because the Ivy Validation (as in Google being the Ivy League of your 20s) meant a lot more to them than it did to people coming from Harvard or Stanford.

I don't intend for this to reflect on Google (he was a level 7 or 8, not a person of significance) as I'm sure that this dynamic exists, to the same degree, at all the hot tech companies.

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