Academia’s culture of overwork almost broke me, so I’m working to undo it

> but I spend the vast majority of my time working on things I'd probably be doing anyways

But is it your project? Or is it your employers, and do they actually own it? If you’re fired, do you still get to work on that project?

> what I'm working on is more interesting than what I'd almost certainly be doing if I had accepting one of my TT offers

I’m curious, why wouldn’t you just decide to work on a project that was more interesting to you?

> But isn't the goal to get off the bullshit ladder?

The goal would be to do research. So my question is: who is doing such independent work? Who are these researchers and how are they disseminating their work? If there aren’t very many of these people, can we not conclude this mode of research is not a viable alternative to mainstream research?

> What's wrong with this?

Nothing is wrong with this. But the suggestion is that if someone wants to do research, they should amass wealth in industry and then do research. My point is that close to 0 people end up taking this route (at least from where I’m sitting, maybe there is a whole community of multimillionaire tech researchers I don’t know about).

So I wonder how viable this path is? Do people just not consider it? Or do they lose interest in research over those two decades? Does life get in the way?

I guess my overall point is that, most people who want to do research, just do it. Spending decades amassing resources just to get started seems backwards.

> took Professor of Practice positions for their kids' college years.

And so you’re saying they funded their own research with their wealth at that point?

> you're spending some of the interest...

I thought we were talking about funding a research agenda. From where I’m sitting, that costs millions. If you’re making millions in interest income, I think we’re talking about at different scales here.

> IS an independently wealthy person... that's the whole point.

My meager research agenda costs roughly $1 million per year (no special equipment or facilities). How long can a retired tech worker burn cash at that rate and still make it through retirement?

Maybe the math works out but I don’t know.

> A STEM PhD, after 10-20 years in tech or finance, IS an independently wealthy person... that's the whole point.

Was an independently wealthy person, as the US job market was rigged to favor upper middle class professionals. Nobody knows if that's going to be the case for the fresh PhDs entering the job market today. Those lucrative careers may be threatened by any number of reasons, including political pressure and/or instability, more PhDs entering the industry, increasing competition due to remote work, and AI.

> The real problem with academics (at least for me) was the lack of any real academic freedom - working 24-7 on something and making sacrifices towards a goal you think is really useful and worthwhile is one thing, but doing it just because there's a pool of funding available for something? That's not worth the bother. In that case it's just a job, a means of earning a living doing some tedious repetitive work, and why spend more than 30-40 hours a week on that?

This is how I tried to justified my poor work-life balance from working on things I am deeply and personally interested in. If we treated grad school like a 9-5 job like all of the internal forces told us to, there's little incentive to stay in a worse version of an industry position that actually has work-life balance and magnitudes-higher compensation.

I did not make the original claim, that more rules stifles progress. Please show me the experiments done to demonstrate this or the logic used in deducing it and I will attempt to devise a counterexample.

The type of "career scientist" that the article portrays is part of the problem. In order to get ahead with a science career, one needs to pursue an extremely narrow specialisation. Otherwise it is impossible to build a stellar reputation. And reputation is the key determinant for being offered a permanent position at a high-ranking institution.

However, many interesting and relevant problems live at the interface of several disciplines. Unfortunately, those working between disciplines will have a hard time getting a permanent job at top universities: Whatever faculty they apply to, there will always be other applicants who are super-specialised and therefore appeal more to the super-specialised faculty members in the hiring committee. That is why true interdisciplinary research still doesn't happen very much, even though it has been praised and encouraged for more than two decades now.

Coming back to the article, in my opinion the solution to overwork is to cut back on elitism. Less famous universities tend to be more relaxed in their recruitment and tenure criteria. Less pressure means more mental flexibility, which can help maintain a wider network of researchers across disciplines. And the wider the network is, the better the chances of being invited to collaborative projects, especially when one has a record of successful interdisciplinary collaboration.

The price to pay is that one will not be able to impress with the name of one's university when doing small talk. But one will be a much more interesting conversation partner — and have free time to meet people outside work with whom to talk.