I think the poster was just pointing to the parallels. It's salient to me as a professor.

FWIW, I think the issues are definitely related though. There's lots of STEM hype in academics as well as in commerce which creates a labor oversupply in both.

The problem is that there are genuine advancements in STEM that are interesting and rewarding, from the academic as well as commercial side, but they're sort of buried in a sea of bullshit, and being able to connect with the worthwhile stuff (financially or otherwise) can often be due to random or sketchy reasons. So people see the great stuff going on, and then either promote it (in the case of politicians and public figures) or pursue it (as someone seeking a career) not realizing that throwing more people at something will necessarily produce more of what we like.

So you end up with the Gallipoli that is modern academics.

As an ex-professor myself, do you understand how the world works? NSF is run by high ranking(in the pyramid scheme) professors. Your tenure depends on raising an army of researchers so you lie about job prospects, lie about research potential outcomes and importance, over-drsmatize the importance of your work, and some even lie in their publications! This is the path to success.

The career path at MIT is work 20 years at MIT then go to a US government funding agency (DARPA, NSF, ONR, etc.) to raise even more money for MIT. These places are staffed 100% by ex-professors (and a few token PhDs who succeeded in industry, to provide political legitimacy "cover".)

Would this explain why MIT has an absurd clawback rate for overhead from NSF GRFs?

University Departments engage in that though, at least mine did. Ambassador programs trying to get kids into the field, pumped up graphs about great career prospects and coming shortages.

Got out of school and story on ground was very different. Wound up programming instead.

I guess their job is to get kids into the program. What happens after doesn't matter so much.