"Hack" is a bad word, because it definitely involves work

But it's 30% research/academic work, 70% playing the system.

>You can't just hack your way into being a STEM professor at a top institution. You actually have to do stuff, discover new things. It's analogous to actually building a good product if you're a startup founder.

From my friends with PhDs, it seems like it's about 30% doing real stuff, 10% fucking around with grant funding paperwork and 60% trying to turn a single result into as many papers as possible in order to maximize impact scores and other metrics.

I'm getting a PhD and it's been 90% real stuff, with no regard towards impact metrics. It probably depends a lot on the subfield. My subfield is less "hot" than most, which some would take as a sign of unhealth, but it means we're spared all these other problems.