Alongside the other major problems with publish-or-perish mentioned in other responses, most people's ability to fulfill their job requirements is not decided by a program committee of 30 colleagues from other workplaces looking-over the reviews given by 3-5 anonymous colleagues, but actually written by their grad-students, based on a bare-minimal reading of your actual work.

A software engineer can commit his code when it compiles and/or when the unit-tests pass. An academic might spend months writing and revising a paper, only to be successively told, "Too many examples", "not enough examples", "there's a bug in your proof", "I can't understand this so it must be brilliant", and finally "too long, didn't read". The paper is then not published, and at minimum the academic must revise the paper and resubmit, taking several more months.

After maybe 6 months, the academic might have succeeded in getting one publication out of one project, and he has to be running multiple papers' worth of projects concurrently throughout the whole year to make sure he produces enough papers each year.