I do not have the perception of academia you describe. Admittedly, I only know people who are professors. It always appeared to me to be a very low stress environment once tenure was achieved. It also appeared to have flexibility for generous downtime. Are you saying you don’t get 3-4 weeks of sick/vacation a year?

As for the Christmas bonus, that is not as common or generous as you might think. I have gotten them, but I would take more job security any day.

I can only compare to my job. (I am not trying to be arrogant). I have 25 years of good experience. I am about as senior as one can get and recognized many times in my field. The stress is enormous to be the best and not make mistakes. I have to produce measurable results but that is not so much the hard part. Positive results over a long period do not generally overshadow high visibility problems. “What have you done lately” is the name of the game.

All are overtly or covertly compared against each other and ranked. Companies get rid of the lower ranked people on a regular basis almost without regard to past performance. The pressure to be among the best is real, especially when budgets are shrinking. This creates a great deal of stress that I did not think existed among similarly accomplished academics. I have never heard of regular purges of tenured professors. I have the impression that it is quite difficult to fire a tenured professor unless they have really messed up.

In my work, there is hardly a discussion after a big mess up. Pack your things and start looking. In some cases, the person thrown out was not really at fault but had to make a fast decision based on imperfect information. If you make the wrong VP look bad, you best leave.

Fortunately, I have never had this happen to me but I have seen it so many times that all live with the stress to keep performing at a very high level and not make mistakes.

You sound like academia is similar and even worse. Is it your experience that this is true? In corporate America, the average person changes jobs every 5 years. Is academia anywhere close to that? (I don’t refer to the non-tenured early portion of a teaching career as I would imagine there is a lot of moving around like in corporate America)

I simply never perceived that level of instability in academia.

I will add, the process of churning through talent in corporate America is not great for the worker but it facilitates the most productive economy on the planet. It is very good at rewarding current producers and getting rid of dead wood. After observing academia as a student, it seemed like there was a portion of dead wood among the older professors. You would never see the equivalent in corporate America unless they were an owner or related to one. I don’t really see this Darwinian process at work among the tenured academics, but I may be mistaken.