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I've described academia (to my friends who work in software) as a company where the most coveted promotion will land you a job in marketing.

It does indeed come with a lot of freedom, but the relatively flat structure means that there's usually no one above the group's PI to promote their research. As a result PIs spend a lot of time writing grant proposals.

Indeed, I moved into a supportive role (software dev, what else) for that reason. Tenure is worse than corporate.

Yes academia is very competitive, even after you get tenure you still need to write grants all the time to be able to do your research.