Oxford accused of relying on young academics employed on gig-economy terms

And different academic jobs can be mostly research or mostly teaching

I was on electrical engineering side of things. Honestly I looked for companies that had large quantities of engineering lay offs about a year beforehand and tried finding contacts and calling them directly. Turns out there were plenty of departments in the shit and needing hires. Landed a position at a defence company.

CS I would have no idea about. I work for a company that does software now but tends not to hire any CS grads.

I wouldn't say this is the case, though it probably looks like this at a superficial level, and is a trendy soundbyte that seems to have gotten a life of its own lately. Plus a lot of what you call 'industry' is in fact driven by universities, e.g. via collaborations or spin-out companies. Deepmind, e.g., a notable example when people point to Google as a research lead in the field, was effectively almost exclusively driven by Oxford academics through their university positions (at least in the beginning, I haven't kept up).

The bigger problem is universities (are forced to?) behave like corporations more and more as opposed to academic institutions, in order to survive silly politics (national and not) but without having the requisite corporate infrastructure and corresponding personnel. Instead, all jobs are offloaded to academics, and made part of their "progress and development report" or whatnot as the main driving factor. Which then dilutes the quality of both teaching and research, cuts down on creative time and replaces it with mountains of bureaucracy and counterproductive deadlines, forces people to cut corners just to keep up with it all, and eventually burns them out.

Example: we have recently been asked to enter a cleaning rota for the office, because management fired the cleaners. And I think it's ridiculous and a sign of things to come, but I do it anyway. I don't know if refusing to clean will somehow find its way on your probation record as "not good academic citizenship", but it's not something I'll refuse to do anyway because I know everyone's in the same boat and I don't want to cause trouble for my team. But, then this behaviour gets normalised, and honestly, at this point academics might as well start mowing the lawn and cleaning the toilets too.

But academia still has better structures / people built around attacking the more 'creative', less profit-driven problems, whereas industry is has different incentives, which seriously constrains where that research can go in its own way. And a lot of the time, when you look under the hood, industry claims are little more than hot air trying to get a quick buck, or they're the last little brick building on years of academic work and then going full PR and taking all the credit; whereas academia does things "slow" and steady for a reason.

Paraphrased: it used to be easier for boomers to get into say the top 2%? I can only guess that the meaning of elite has changed.

Aside: a comment with the word "boomer" in it is usually offensive in my experience. But doing worry, you'll get a different word applied to you when you reach the same age cohort. Disclosure: not a boomer.

There are two types of people in the world: those that split the world into two groups, and those that don't.

The article is talking about full-on lectureships, for example, this part-time role, initially advertised as full-time, according to the article:

>> One of Oxford’s top colleges, Christ Church, which had an income of £42.6m in 2022-23, is currently advertising a stipendiary lectureship in modern European history for £15,244 to £16,983.

For comparison, 15-16k was the range of my PhD stipend at Imperial College London between 2017-22 (I never got a clear answer what it was supposed to be exactly, from the admin, so I had to estimate it from my monthly pay, which fluctuated). It always stayed below minimum wage (so I didn't have to repay my undergard tuition fee loan). That's normal for PhD stipends, but it really shouldn't be for a lectureship.

I believe what you're thinking of is TA work: "marking lab reports or programming assessments". I did some of that, during my PhD. I don't remember the pay rate but it was less than minimum wage and the jobs were part-time and didn't last for more than a semester obviously. That kind of job is, indeed, ideal when you're looking for "a little side income", but a lectureship is supposed to be your main line job, not a side hustle.