alt Hacker NewsAcademia's current structure rewards behaviors that don't necessarily create value. The "publish or perish" mentality encourages quantity over quality, leading to the replication crisis where many published findings can't be reproduced. The system tends to reward those who conform to existing academic paradigms while marginalizing innovative outsider perspectives that might bring valuable real-world insights.
When academics move directly from being students to faculty without external experience, it creates an echo chamber. This isolation from practical applications and market forces risks turning academic pursuit into a self-referential game - where success is measured by metrics like publication count and citation numbers rather than actual contribution to human knowledge or societal progress.
This separation from real-world feedback mechanisms means we may be investing significant human capital into activities that optimize for academic metrics rather than meaningful outcomes. The challenge isn't just about individual careers, but about ensuring our research institutions remain connected to the practical problems they're meant to help solve.
"Publish or perish" is fundamentally a wrong diagnosis. Publishing is generally the good part of the academia. If you are interested in your work, you obviously want to tell about it to other people in the field. Some specific publication venues are tedious and bureaucratic, but the pressure to publish is generally internal, not external.
Moving directly from being students to faculty is rare. It mostly happens in fields where the demand for PhDs is unusually high. Because universities can't compete with salaries, they have to offer positions people may not be ready for if they want to attract top candidates.
The norm is doing PhD, postdoc, and the first faculty position in different institutes – precisely to avoid the echo chamber effect. And unless you are from a particularly large country, you are expected to do at least one of them outside your home country.
Success measures are what they are for two reasons: competition and long-term focus. Academic research is fundamentally interesting, and there are far more competent people trying to do it than funding. And because people can't afford to wait for decades to measure the real-world impact, the academia must base career progression on something that can be determined quickly enough. If you are doing the kind of research where practical applications can be expected in a few years, the industry is a better place for you. They have a lot more resources for research than the academia.
I'm currently doing research on a topic I started working on ~15 years ago. In that time, the topic has progressed from something interesting and potentially valuable to a mainstream idea with plenty of research funding. If the work is successful, we may start seeing measurable real-world impact in 5-10 years.