The entire college phd system is toxic and self serving.
At my local college the guy the physic department building was named after was obsessed with some weird thing that no one understood and when he died they just mothballed all his "projects" equipment. No one had any idea what it was or what to do with it and it filled a good part of the building. He was not easy to get along with and shot down anything that he didn't like without even discussion. I'm told this is not in any way uncommon in the field.
Academia now selects for people who are good at navigating bureaucracy and getting research funding rather than people who are good at doing actual research
Shitting on academia is certainly one of them, but lets look at the merit of each comment for themselves.
As someone with a lot of friends in academia, but luckily not dependent on it myself, I was quite shocked by the amount of politics, polishing, neck rubbing etc. going on. Scientists present as very clean and orderly to the outside, but the process of writing a paper and getting it published is usually super messy.
I don't want to say of course it is, but of course it is.
It's an environment full of smart and hungry and competitive people. There are politics, yes, but you can damn well choose to avoid them, especially if you offer value.
Nobody in any industry presents all of the warts and difficulties of getting to a solution. If you wanted to hear about six years of failed experiments, I've got lots of time, but I feel like you don't want to hear it and neither do the people reading and writing research papers.
You'll find that outside of the superstar schools, the smaller schools (certain depts) are staffed with brilliant people. They'll tell you about the nuances of academia if you're a normal person but they're not going to show up on HN where people say what they do is worthless, so people get warped views of what the majority of it is.
The kind which agree with the HN group think - "nuclear energy is good", "Electron is bad", "Chrome is good", oh wait, that was 2009 HN group think, today is "Chrome is bad".
Academia and any sort of formal education is a waste of money. Math is difficult because of the notation used. The random guy who shows up in any ML/AI thread and starts talking about how useless it is because it’s not AGI. How stupid every hiring process is, especially anything involving testing technical competency.
True, but he died before he ever published anything about it. I was dating a girl that worked there at the time is the only reason I got to see any of this. There were hundreds of these large 6-10ft tall cylinders with lots of science looking stuff in them that were made I guess? for interchanging between some sort of system in a sub zero room full of other equipment. I was kind of impressed at first then more disappointing that literally no one could even tell me what the stuff was or what he was working on. I didn't get to really see what was in the cold room since everything was already disassembled and boxed or piled up in the case where it didn't fit in boxes. Also I don't know what the room is really called but it was made to be cold and was not active at the time I was there.
There were also piles of very expensive scientific machinery that he gutted for single parts. Because apparently simply sourcing the part he needed for say $250k less was beneath his time so since he had tenure and budget he would just order something he already knew had what he wanted and gutted it leaving behind a very expense broken machine/instrument.
He also believed that women brains were incapable of doing science so she didn't really like him much as you could imagine.
I am not in favour of naming people, but in case of academics I think senior professor is something like being an employer. It's not going to change when people see it as a distant example. You could say I don't understand the method of this person and don't like his/her approach.
I have worked in academia. I can't think of a single prof like that in my department. They exist, but that's not why people choose to spend decades of their life in poor paying jobs.
This is likewise anecdata. Experiences vary, so I don't know if I'd throw "normal academia" out there without having a full view of the sector as a whole, which few if any do.
At my local college the guy the physic department building was named after was obsessed with some weird thing that no one understood and when he died they just mothballed all his "projects" equipment. No one had any idea what it was or what to do with it and it filled a good part of the building. He was not easy to get along with and shot down anything that he didn't like without even discussion. I'm told this is not in any way uncommon in the field.