You're right in that it's judgmental; I'm not at all familiar with him. Perhaps he's just gotten burned out on professorship. But this is coming from the horse's mouth.
While geting tenure at harvard is indeed no small feat, I doubt teaching has much to do with it. Teaching sadly plays little role in getting tenure, especially for prestigious institutions. Grants and papers are the most significant points.
Teaching has nothing to do with it (see Brian Harvey at the bottom of the ranks).
Papers have nothing to do with it. Really few papers are read these days. I would guess, that an average IEEE author _writes_ the same number or more papers than reads (write-only memory doesn't make sense).
Even less papers have an actual academic impact in CS in the age of the internet, where bits come at the price of caffeine and inspirations of ideas of somebody from a blog/news site (peer review comes in the comments). Not much old-school papers, journals or libraries. As always, there are few exceptions, but you are certainly better off playing the lottery.
Non-virtualizable science is a different matter (wet lab, electronics, physical experiments etc.) But bureaucrats prefer in silico, because it is cheaper.
I may be wrong, but it does not seem like you have much experience in academics.
I don't know any university where papers (and more especially their impact, as measure by h index and co) do not matter a lot when getting tenure (or any kind of post PhD position, really).
They do matter, I think our experience does match. This is part of the problem I was alluding to.
All I am saying is, that I do no longer take for granted the paper/IF (& other Thomson ISI Corp.) science metrics as the golden standard, because it is being actively abused (clique self-referencing, grant business etc.). This is not a new controversy, and I think it is much like the RIAA/MP3 shift, which is not only taking place in publishing (web daily news, kindle etc), but also in scientific publication (NIH publication policy etc).
arxiv.org seems to be one of the best technical compromises, but unfortunately, it doesn't fit very well in the establishment's established authoritative scheme (IEEE, ACM etc), which is a racket by anyone's standards. And it can be misleading too (there was an ARS report on this, about the level of trust in the result being published).
Long story short: I, for one (and I think you too) are very unlikely to get tenure based on papers on arxiv.org about volcanoes, transportation, urbanization and JIT. No matter how good we are in Linux sysadmin an distributed systems.
Though back on topic, publication per se is what early stage training is about (and not PhD), in my experience. Of course, one can always ''downgrade'' an EST to a PhD, but then one has to go through all the post-docs, to get to be staff again. Short of luck, of course. For those with tenure, it is very rare to actually write papers to publish (though it does exist) -- that is what students, assistants and fellows are kept around for.
Oh, sorry about the confusion. I realized afterwards that you may have actually described how it should instead of the how it is. Maybe my English is faulty, but I think it was important to stress this for people outside of academia, it could be misleading otherwise.
Otherwise, I agree almost entirely with you - I myself left academia mostly for those reasons. Whether tenure professors do write papers depend quite a bit on the field, though - I know many professors in statistics who still contribute significantly to papers written by co-authors (mostly grad students, post docs), for example.
No, it is a little worse. He mentions the usual grant-squirrel-wheel.
But he remains silent on the BS part, which I guess he got bored with. I think he got disgusted the day he realized, that writing ''scientific'' papers about virtual economies and pseudo-medical sensor devices and about volcanoes -- as serious they might sound to an administrative bureaucrat handing out pennies for the researchers -- it is just plain BS, even if he may have some facts right. It is making life worse, by diluting the cool stuff with useless junk (fail often mantra, but for its on sake).
If one stops admiring the Emperor's new clothes and breaks ranks on BS groupthink, there is no surprise in exclusion and ostracism. It is a no brainer necessity to leave.
