On the use of a life:

"academia is a lousy place to do novel research"

My supervisor cautioned me of the risks of doing work which was overly novel as a young academic: Committees don't know what to make of you, and they don't have any reputational prior to fall back upon

Reviewers at the Journal of Cryptology didn't understand why they were being asked to read a paper about CPU design, while reviewers at a computer hardware journal didn't understand why they were being asked to read about cryptography

if I wanted to succeed in academia I would need to churn out incremental research papers every year — at very least until I had tenure

When it comes to research, I can follow my interests without regard to the whims of granting agencies and tenure and promotion committees

academic institutions systemically promote exactly the sort of short-term optimization of which, ironically, the private sector is often accused. Is entrepreneurship a trap? No; right now, it's one of the only ways to avoid being trapped

Sure, I have customers to assist, servers to manage (not that they need much management), and business accounting to do; but professors equally have classes to teach, students to supervise, and committees to attend

If you’re going to equate teaching / supervising students with business accounting, then it’s probably safe to say academia is the wrong field to enter.

Might vary by field or, more likely, institution but for some students are absolutely viewed as a tax.

unfortunately true 😞