I thought I wanted to be a professor, then I served on a hiring committee (2021)
science.org
science.org
Both up for tenure - the amazing professor was passed on because the other had a more desirable background. Both women. As a grad student, I understood the difficult of hiring, but this was honestly incredible.
I thought of this when I read the following from the article: "I was startled to learn that academic achievements were not always what mattered most." and "only to fall short of securing a faculty position due to factors outside my control."
Just a different story from academia.
Want a top 5 TT job? Find 10k followers. There are other paths but this is by far the easiest
I suspect it's the case 99% of the time. You have some widget factory, some team leader leaves, and of his team of 10 you need a new leader. 4 of them are veterans and could do the work if you asked people who understand the business but are not involved in the decision. So then what? Well lets say you have to have published papers in the Journal of Widgets. Great, that leaves three. Now let's see how they do on random questions at interview. Fantastic, 4 of the 6 committee members think it's candidate B. Congrats.
It's an effect of the pyramid structure. People who can do the work have to be whittled away somehow, even if it's some silly criterion.
If you just want to scratch that teaching and mentoring itch, you can opt out of most of the bullshit by avoiding the R1 tenure stream. A good route to take is Professor of Practice at a non-elite institution (just email the chair -- if you're an asset and don't want a TT position the wheels can turn surprisingly quickly), and if you happen across a grad student worth investing in sourcing a small grant and co-advising.
In startups this phenomenon takes the form of hires, board members, or advisors with all the right names in their CV (Stanford, Google, etc.) brought in to pump up the company’s prestige points in the eyes of potential investors.
I watched this 8-part documentary where kids get invited to a special school to learn magic.
Growing universities with colleges that want endowments, faculty whose families are deeply entrenched in related institutions or culture, and generally prestigious and well-connected people are all necessary and make for perfectly valid candidates.
Academics isn't all academics. You need people who can grow and sustain development, attract desirable talent, work at the state and local level, and pull in students. People have to manage the internal administrative duties and external involvement of each school. Plus, some people make excellent teachers and leaders but awful researchers, and vice versa. Others are mediocre but consistent, don't have higher prospects, and take on administrative burdens. There's no real "ideal professor" any more than there's any ideal human.
Nepotism is raging, notably within academia settings particularly for "nepotism babies".
Even University of Texas exempt anti-nepotism for many positions.
https://independentprobe.com/2022/11/21/nepotism-and-undue-p...
It's not the end of the world as long as you're not authortiarian and inclined to believe that in any hierarchy, the more valuable/skilled/apt person is naturally at the top.
It's very hard to create a system that scales and doesn't show signs of heavy bureocracy and/or corruption (if you know about the internals) because, very soon, it's easy to find out a gap between working for your career and working to maximise the output value of your job.
Routine research often is easier to get through funding committees and get published. Less "what journal does this fit in, I'm not sure our division should fund this, does the PI truly have the expertise needed to do research in this, this result doesn't clearly advance the field"
Given that both were women, gender wasn't the deciding factor. And so race becomes the most likely desirable background to matter.
Some school systems are very explicit about this. See https://pacificlegal.org/california-globe-university-of-cali... for criticism of the UC schools on this. But as https://www.economist.com/united-states/2023/02/04/american-... makes clear, the trend is happening nationwide.
I was in the author's shoes, but I was lucky enough to find out all the same information through Internet sites written by embittered PhDs who described what the negative side of the process was like. I went into industry instead, first for an R&D government contractor, then big tech. Like the author, I don't have any regrets about it.
I don't blame the committee for filtering on specialty, though. The academic job market is so tight for applicants that every PhD has to flood every job opening with applications to have a chance. There's something to be said for channeling people to the right job instead of any old job.
PhD programs IMO should stop being an implicit lottery for the ivory tower, maybe by having explicit "industry" and "academia" tracks and being careful with how many of the academic PhDs they're producing. But they'd have to admit just how unfair the system is to the students.
Too often, grad school applicants are just kids that have overachieved in academic settings and think to themselves “I’ve been good at school my whole life, why not just do school forever?”. A lot of them would actually thrive in industry but they just continue doing school out of inertia.
Grad school could help those kids figure out if they like working in industry by mixing in courses taught by industry folks and/or pushing for internships rather than traditional RA positions.
Anecdotally, I did not observe this during my PhD studies (theorerical CS) in Central Europe. I think this might be due to the separate 3 year Bachelor track, then a 2 year Master track, and only then 4 year PhD studies.
Sure enough, a lot of applicants faced tough career decisions after graduating, but whoever started the PhD usually knew what research is about and that it's going to be work first and foremost, not just "more school".
There is, it's called getting a master's degree. Typically, the first two years of a US CS PhD are a mix of research and classes, and the remaining few years are pure research. Students that are good at classes but bad at research should be able to walk away with a master's degree after two years, whose requirements they have should be at least close to meeting. I'm sure this varies a bit between schools, though I hope not too much because it's an essential escape valve.
Students that know up front that they just want to continue to be students should go for a master's degree, and one without a research requirement if possible.
("Bad at research" meaning "bad at research in combination with their advisor", which can be due to the student, or the advisor, or the way they interact.)
the non-prof path isn't for people that are 'bad at research', its for people that want to do research outside of universities. so their theses wouldn't be crafted around"what will get grants/be publishable" but instead focus on "what would an R&D department in my field find interesting/valuable".
Ultimately I don't think there is a need for something between a masters and a PhD. Any attempt to make an alternative PhD will just become "PhD-lite", and the best students (whether they want to stay in academia or not) will still funnel into the more prestigious traditional PhD program and will be more desirable hires in industry because they come from a more elite pedigree.
Many begin a PhD because they want to avoid becoming a code monkey at some company. They hope that the PhD opens doors to intellectually engaging work. And it often does. If you check the graduates of CS advisors, they often end up at prestigious, well-paid research labs. Or they simply start their own company based on work done in the PhD.
I am not sure if the non-professor track would change anything. Most schools already do not require teaching because they want their CS PhDs to focus on research.
This calculus might of course be completely different for other disciplines.
Academia tends to be really opaque and BS heavy because the the games that need to be played are far more opaque (by design), and concrete objectively useful results far less important.
The criticism is that the performance metrics are often in opposition or irrelevant to the stated mission(s) of said academic institutions.
This is something I deeply believe.
Goals: educate individuals and produce original research.
Metrics: h-index (h papers with >= h citations), frequency of publication, academic service (politics).
Teaching is generally not considered an important metric. H-index biases to quantity of papers rather than quality, and there is a pseudo-pursuit for novelty while the most important thing in science is reproducibility (hence our crisis). I would say that evaluation of academics is nowhere near aligned with the stated goal of academic institutions and there's a reason several Nobel prize winners have stated that they do not think they would have made it in today's system.
The main problem is that no one knows how to measure it. There are many metrics, and as far as I know, all of them are mostly noise.
In research, metrics are highly imperfect, but at least they do carry some signal.
Teaching is a long game.
It’s a given that a professor should be knowledgeable in their own topic; but the measure of success for a teacher in higher education is in how knowledgeable and influential their own students are.
Contrast Emmy Noether to, say, Isaac Newton. Both were brilliant and loved their topics; but only one was an actual teacher. The other was paranoid and egotistical.
Now in matter of influence and metrics: It shouldn’t just be measured in novel research and publishing but the ability to replicate and/or filter out bullshit research as well.
Finally, I’d also go as far as to say professionals in industry should be able to link to their old professors and not just institutions.
I have so many old, no-name instructors (some dead) who somehow managed to ignite a genuine interest in their topics.
I wish I could honor them in a standardized way.
this is exactly right, and if thought about carefully, probably impossible to measure without your later suggestion.
> only one was an actual teacher. The other was paranoid and egotistical.
Hot take. I approve.
> shouldn’t just be measured in novel research and publishing but the ability to replicate and/or filter out bullshit research as well.
Replication is the foundation of science. It is the only way to actually fight the tyranny of metrics because replication always necessitates variance from the original. Failure to replicate doesn't simply mean fraud, as many believe, but that there are confounding variables that were not uncovered in the original. That's just another piece of the puzzle. But whats destructive is that you can uncover there, formulate a better hypothesis, and then fail to get published due to lack of novelty. Generally associated with reviewers stating that your claim is obvious, despite it not being in the literature or not being able to get anyone to make similar claims prior to giving evidence. There's a reason scissors took a long time to invent, because despite what they look like, it isn't just slapping two knives together.
> I’d also go as far as to say professionals in industry should be able to link to their old professors and not just institutions.
At least this happens with the PhD level, but I do wonder if this could help at a lower level. Or if this would just end up making the tyranny of metrics worse as people try to extract too strong of a signal? I went to a low rank undergraduate school and I know for a fact that my math education was better than friends who went far more prestigious schools. I took more classes, went in more depth, and was able to solve more Putnam problems than them (only a few total btw, but I did physics not math).
With school rankings, I think it is quite silly how we quantify them. I mean if you take schools on csranking.org (at least the top 30) doing a linear regression of the rank against the number of faculty results in a extremely good fit. But I'm not sure why people would be surprised about this given that you're basically limited to teaching at universities ranked lower than the one you graduated from, which should result in homogenization. Yet we still care deeply. Tracking professors sounds like a lot of work, with similarly high variance. I can see utility given that it can help show that you took an easy or a hard professor, but that might just also end up with similar metric hacking where a professor becomes hard rather than successful (because people are likely to measure via failure rate than a more intangible and stochastic long-term outcome based metric which would be coupled with every other educator the student had). It seems easier to just not care. You should get nearly as good outcomes while exerting several orders of magnitude fewer resources. I'm not against it, I just think it would be likely to be far more abused than the current shitty metrics we already use. I think we just at the end of the day need to embrace the stochastic nature of things, and if we don't incorporate that into our models then we're going to end up with bad outcomes. Causal inference is crazy fucking hard because there are far more confounding variables than people assert and more often than not there are elements which are not distinguishable. That many different paths can lead to the same outcome. I'm certainly not saying to give up or abandon metrics, but rather that shits hard and when we start forgetting that we make big mistakes.
This is true for every single aspect of academia, even research. I don't think our metrics in research are good and that they are the reason we have the replication crisis. Metrics are always guides, having limitations and biases unique to each one. Over-reliance just results in Goodhart's Law, and instead of embracing the noise inherent to the system we have ill conceived attempts to remove it. Attempts to create meritocratic systems frequently result in less meritocratic systems than were being "improved" upon.
We ended up doing a standardized set of Zoom interviews for about 15 of them - here too, many candidates were simply unable to clearly explain their past work and make a clear pitch for their vision and work (even with slides). This is an essential skill for running a lab and one any prospective candidate should practice and refine! From that point on the whole department was involved and, at least for us, everyone had an equal say and felt safe speaking up. ~4-5 were invited for on-campus interviews and one candidate was liked the most by nearly everyone, leading to a consensus.
As a public university, there are a lot of things we do in a standardized way, and sets of personal questions etc. we do not ask. Is it fair? I'll leave others to judge, as selecting one person to hire out of ~200 applicants is not an easy task. But I don't think it was capricious either. At our department, we intend for everyone who comes as an assistant prof to be tenured, so it is very much a long-term hire and commitment we are making. We take that job seriously.
This is interesting, why do you think they fumbled? Is it a lack of practice/experience in presenting these ideas or is it an indicator of a grad student who has become a foot soldier for a PI?
If anything, I've seen people that look great on paper, coming from the pedigreed lab/ and fancy PhD institution fail at this stage. So perhaps there's some overconfidence there. Indeed, no one in our department had any connection to, or prior knowledge of, the candidate who was ultimately given the offer. Once they got past the initial screening, through both virtual and in-person interviews, their technical depth and breadth, teaching skills and overall collegiality shone through.
All that being said, I don't doubt that all the questionable things mentioned in the article above occur, and perhaps widely. But, there is hope! And there's no better place to start than those of us who are younger faculty.
My father ( university professor) told me that unfortunately this was all too common.
I stayed clear of academia after that.
My suspicion for the reason that academia is seen as being so political is because they're actually not very good at it. The top of the heap of political practitioners in my experience tend to be the VP+ level leadership in publicly traded companies.
I work on a daily basis with Vp+ level leadership of a publicly traded company and yes, they’re much better at it. But there’s just as much politics as in academia : people fight for power, money, prestige which are increasingly concentrated as you go up.
> Sayre's law states, in a formulation quoted by Charles Philip Issawi: "In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake." By way of corollary, it adds: "That is why academic politics are so bitter."
"You turn it into some Dynasty s**t, like: ”She’s trying to destroy me!” What the f**k are you talking about? You wrap up bags at J.C. Penney’s! What’s she doing, ripping up your paper?" - Chris RockK-12, Post Secondary, Teaching...
Maybe a vacation or two in there...
They've never truly existed outside the school system, and in many ways never grew out of it. In many ways, academics stay kids thier entire lives.
When you look at school children's behavio and the politics of high school, it all makes sense that academia is highly "political" in the most childish manner.
Yea... that's apples and oranges in many respects.
Honestly, I'm surprised at the candor! Were the other employees also teenagers, or were you told this by an adult? I'd somewhat expect that somewhere with such a strong "workplace politics" culture would have been more worried that you'd be a competitor, but I could see an adult being more candid with someone much younger due to not perceiving them as a "threat".
https://acoup.blog/2023/04/28/collections-academic-ranks-exp...
https://acoup.blog/2022/12/23/fireside-friday-december-23-20...
https://acoup.blog/2021/10/01/collections-so-you-want-to-go-...
We’d sift through maybe 200 applications, quickly reject most (i.e., do they have any top pubs in the area we are hiring for?). Most of them were wildly out of scope.
Pick 10 from the remaining 30 applicants that we think (a) are the best and (b) would potentially accept the offer.
We had several failed searches after many, many interviews.
White male - Room mate of employee
White male - Room mate of employee
White male - Knew early employee from college in Switzerland
White female - Recruited off of LinkedIn
Indian American - Recruited off of LinkedIn
Immigrant Indian American - Recruited off of LinkedIn.
There is a lot of favoritism that goes on in industry as well. However, it is so large that it can accommodate both merit-based and network based hiring. Hiring is a total crap shoot anyway and this is not to say that just because someone comes recommended by someone else they are automatically bad. They just look better in comparison because mentally we automatically lower the hiring bar as this person comes "recommended" from a known source.
There sure is, but I don't think your example is evidence for that. People just like to hire based on recommendations and through friends. Several times now I've been interested in some startup, and when I looked at their team page, they were all from the same group: either all Indian, or all russian speakers, or something else. I bet most startups are like this, just that some cases are more apparent than others.
Is the founder white? Does he/did he live in a majority white country (you mentioned a college in Switzerland, a country which is most likely 90% white)? If so, why is that weird and why does that matter? Unless you think that "white men" are fungible, using this category makes no sense.
What sriram_sun said is entirely factual, and a lot of us get left out of the networks for various reasons. That's also just factual. The fact that folks here are all "oh you're just jealous, you're calling it nepotism" -- nah, it's just facts, and there is no need to get emotional about it. There is nothing inherently wrong about hiring people you know -- like any move in a game, it has knock-on effects. If you'd like to help broaden networks, just do it. And for those who feel defensive about it, consider the phrase "hit dogs holler".
But I'd probably hire in a similar way for a startup. Not because of nepotism, but because I know the kinds of peope I want to hire are massively productive and good at their respective fields, I'd be honored if they could do that work under me.
(note: no real plan to do this and half my friends aren't in my specific domain regardless).
This was the bay area.
My comment is highlighting structural imbalances as they exist in society right now.
Even though networking as a way to grow, it is not an option for a lot of people until much later in their careers. That is because of social conditioning.
You sound like you'll be a problematic employee for the totally bizarre reason that you're jealous of how other people got hired before you.
Consider the empathy from the other side: I'm working in a stable job and my friend approached me saying he's got this big idea. May not even be funded yet. Do I use my part time to help on his dream in hopes that we get funding and maybe expand on the idea? That's a lot of trust and energy being put into another person.
On the end of the "nepotee" it really depends on the person and what you know. And it takes a certain style of mind to get on board that idea. That isn't the same in getting fast tracked to some cushy Google job.
But hey, government doesn't let me. So instead I'm going to assume experience by minorities is suspect due to discriminatory hiring practices like AA and DEI, and continue to hire mostly white and asian males because they're the most disenfranchised groups atm, especially in South Africa.
The only problem here is the insistence on seeing things through the clownish lens of the "race-sex" combo. It makes it sounds like you can pretty much interchange "white males", like - "I guess I've already got a white guy friend, now I need an asian, and a black one". Nobody sane makes friends like that.
I would be really surprised if you didn't have a: "Indian guy - Room mate of employee" "Indian guy - Room mate of employee" "Indian guy - Room mate of employee" network in many Indian startups. Except each of those dudes would be a different person, with different experience, differente world view, different likes and dislikes, so what does it matter that they are Indian?
Don't forget caste details of each one in that list.
So yeah, I guess it was the most important thing.
In retrospect, having now learned more about the realities of academic life, this is probably one of the best things that ever happened to me. I think I would have been as miserable as a professor as I was as a grad student. The idea that tenure == freedom turns out to be a Big Lie. There is no more freedom in academia than there is anywhere else in the world. The life of a professor is, first and foremost, a never-ending Sisyphean treadmill of writing grant proposals. At the end of the day, it's all about the money.
Of course you can get yourself into a nice comfortable niche where you are The Man and all your proposals are greenlit by default, but you can do that outside of academia too by finding a patron or a big enough group of fans, but then you are beholden to them. The only real freedom is having money of your own, and even that comes with strings attached because then you have to manage the money and deal with people asking you to write checks.
Always be careful what you wish for. The hardest part of getting what you want is figuring out what it is.
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_1990s_recession_in_the_U...
As a tenured professor, I can confirm all this as an accurate description.
Furthermore, to add to what you said, you don't even have real freedom on things like where to publish - the typical question of "why don't you just refuse to submit articles to exploitative for-profit publishers like Elsevier?" - because you are almost always working with PhD students, postdocs, etc. And while your career may not depend on where you publish, theirs does. (A possible exception to this is mathematics, and maybe some other research fields, where many papers are single-author. But that only happens in a minority of disciplines).
There is something where the freedom is more or less real, though: choosing research subjects. This year I wanted to do some fun experiments with LLMs, not very related to my usual research. I found a collaborator, did that, had fun, and it's part of the work I'm paid to do. That's a kind of freedom that most jobs don't give you. Even that is quite restricted because most of your research has to be on things that funding agencies like, but at least it's something.
There's kind of a "haha, we're screwed" undertone to a lot of things. How is a young person really supposed to know which ones are really horrible dead ends and which ones are actually workable if you care?
Is a singing career or a professor more of a dead end? English PhD or history PhD? Lawyer or video game programmer?
Those all have different chances for success, different time horizons, and different off-ramps when they don't work out.
Tracks that allow you to have some kind of job earlier, even an unskilled/unrelated one, at least allow you to potentially collect some savings or maybe even start a family. It grounds you in reality somewhat so you can compare your life against the world around you rather than only seeing your peers struggling with you.
In contrast to what the writer described, I had an experience where a colleague strongly opposed considering his former PhD student for a position because their research interests were significantly different from the advertised position.
One thing that has consistently surprised me during these hiring exercises is encountering candidates who appear exceptional on paper and deliver a decent public talk about their past research but completely fail when it comes to their proposed research talk.
At least in science, if you're truly exceptional, you will find a position at a top place, despite whatever politicking or EDI considerations are influencing the hiring process.
This alone happens more frequent than not. Idea here is to land (PhD) on a remarkable lab with a supervisor on the committee...
Heck, I have been out of academia 4 years now and I still have minor revisions to a paper complete in the next week!
I don't know... sometimes, there are those things that might be difficult and then not worth it. It strikes me that to be a professor, you have to be a little out of it, maybe even a little psycho.
Leaving a toxic environment makes it less toxic for everyone else. Even the worst bosses will respond to the fact that people are walking out the door and nobody is walking in.
Referring to someone's CV is not in principle different from referral by a person. It's just another document that has been curated by people, for the same purpose.
When the position is such that there are specific requirements; those abilities/skills can be tested with interviews etc, like how it works in most recruitment for professionals.
This is my general perspective. There might be certain cases I'd have a different opinion.
In CS this is trivial, as long as you're doing science that is still relevant to the world and not working on some inane corner of some pet project from the 1980s that people should've stopped thinking about a long time ago :)
Or maybe we're misunderstanding one another. By "inane corner" I mean "can't even fill a single session at a 100 person specialized conference". Even in the early 2000s NIPS was larger than I'd consider "inane corner sized".
Professorial hiring committees are often silly since they demand outrageous things yet the pay is laughable. Since I have a lot of hiring experience as a research director in industry, I saw a lot of talent that I would try to grab, but that academic colleagues did not consider a good enough match due to the limited fit with the desired profile, even if that meant re-advertising and wasting another year.
While what you say about hiring committees is true, I would still not recommend to talented scientists to let all that deter them. If you have the passion for science, give it everything - so that you can say on your deathbed, "at least I tried"; any other life choice probably won't let you go in peace (who wants to think "what if...?").
To be fair: "industry" is not one thing. There's a huge difference between being a software engineer at a non-R&D software company doing uninteresting consulting or project work and being a SWE in Google Brain/FAIR/etc. Hell, there's a huge difference between positions with the same job title in the same mega-corps.
Most professors -- even in CS -- aren't able to get the types of industry jobs that keep the academic door open. It's really only a few subfields where those industry jobs are available.
So, as a general role, saying that it's difficult to move between the two is fairly accurate.
> since they demand outrageous things yet the pay is laughable.
The process is prohibitive before the packet even reaches the committee. Writing three or four essays, asking for three letters of recommendation, and committing to a full on-site interview loop for a job that comes with at least a half million dollar pay cut.
Most SWEs in these places are doing uninteresting work.
It’s like dating. If a company is just not into me, I shrug and move on.
The friend got a job at Google, and as far as I can tell, is supporting their spouse's dedication to this job search.
I just don't have ... that. Give me a decent project and weekends, please.
Your friend is a saint. Those types of multi-postdoc job hunts usually end in divorce. I can't imagine that PLUS another PhD.
If I were doing that, it would almost certainly stem from an unhealthy fixation.
But that's a sampling problem. If you listen to that too much, you end up like this person. The 9X.YY% of those who want to be a professor probably had all that, plus a healthy dose of realism to get out while the getting is good. The absolute worst part of all this is that very few profs seem all that happy.
Kind of like CEOs, but I think being a wage-earning, low-to-moderately successful founder has a higher likelihood of panning out than being a wage-earning professor by a long shot.
Tenure-track faculty have barely any time to breathe given all the hassle they have to go through. It's mostly done by grad students who are still learning the ropes. Ofc. this is different in places like Math depts. where it can't work the way it does in CS/EE.
What a sweet kid.
For example it's okay for a PhD not to be a professor, not to do research, not even work in their original field, etc - and have a satisfactory career trajectory. It also happens to get a PhD, "do everything right" and get tenure and not be happy about it. The problem whether with PhD or anything else, is this "shot in the dark" problem and lack of well, guidance about the wealth of options out there.
Industry hiring isn't fair either, but there is a lot less competition, more flexibility and generally much better pay.
then I had to go through some traditions which are trying to teach me things I had to unlearn while working 'professionally'
needless to say, my degree is on hiatus; why learn things which I know I will have to unlearn later when I go back into 'industry'?
and then the pandemic happened, and then FAANG fired tens of thousands and now I cannot find a job to go back to
Right after the PhD, people typically apply for entry-level positions at that same university. At that point, there is some "weeding out" (no positions for everyone) but if you get one, you're pretty much set for stability. You need to endure years of crappy salary and a lot of evaluations, but if you can generate a decent amount of publications (even if not stellar) you will typically promote until you eventually get to a permanent position. In theory, promotions are public calls open to anyone, but in practice the "home" candidate almost always wins because no one wants to kick out someone who is already working there and familiar with the specific research topic, courses, etc. to hire someone who would have to learn from scratch. Plus, if you do that, the disgruntled candidate will then try to kick others out of their positions to take their place, people don't want to open that Pandora's box, so most promotions (e.g. from associate to full professor) have only one candidate, the "home" candidate.
This system has obvious problems: first, nepotism is easy, because the real selection (not the promotions that are mostly just a formality, as I explained) is done quite early and typically the professor has a lot of say on who to hire. Mostly professors want the best candidates, because there is a lot of competition for grants, salary complements, etc. (everything is evaluated and measured here), but sometimes people will just favor a friend, relative or whatever. Second, mobility is almost impossible, because you'll practically never be able to get a non-entry-level position from a different university. Let alone applying to a Spanish position from outside Spain!
This system is frowned upon, many in society view university as corrupt, so there is a lot of push to go towards an "Anglo-Saxon" system as described in this post. Now they are emphasizing a second way to become a professor, by applying to a competitive postdoc with forced mobility to the government, as universities are incentivized (with money) to create permanent positions for people who have that.
It's good that there is this alternative as a backup for good candidates, and I would definitely support other measures like making selection for entry-level positions fairer or reserving a percentage of positions for outside candidates, but after seeing accounts like this, I think our system is less bad than it gets credit for and it wouldn't be a good idea to go full Anglo-Saxon.
For all its faults, at least here you finish your PhD at 27 years old or so (it's 3-4 years, not 5-6 as in the US) and not much later, you already have an idea of your chance for a position. Better to be unfairly excluded due to nepotism at that point in your career than 10 years later, like the post seems to be describing. And if you leave for industry, the PhD was a job with a normal salary so you haven't paid too harsh an opportunity cost.
Under the more "modern" Anglo-Saxon system, it's common to be in your late thirties doing postdocs, moving from place to place (something that most Spaniards don't want, here family ties are stronger than in the US and most people want to stay close to family) and with difficulties to form a family or settle down due to uncertainty and constant mobility. And if that were implemented here, we wouldn't even have the consolation of a good salary, as academia is quite underpaid here - so I think it would actually lower the quality of the staff hired by making the academic career quite undesirable for many...
I wonder if there is an ideal system with the best of both worlds. I have good vibes about France (I know people who got permanent positions there soon after PhD, under what seemed like a merit-based system with committees) but maybe I'm just idealizing due to ignorance, as many Spaniards do with the Anglo-Saxon system which they view as fair and free from corruption.