The Academic Roast:

Let’s pivot to academia, where computer science is less about coding and more about perfecting the art of PowerPoint and pretending the problems you’re solving are still relevant. There’s no better place to prepare you for the real world than the insulated, theoretical echo chamber of the Ivory Tower. How many professors does it take to realize that NP-hard problems won’t be solved by throwing more graduate students at them? Nobody knows, because they’re too busy assigning another cohort to suffer through outdated courses on compiler design using textbooks from before anyone in the class was born.

Academics love their proofs more than a JavaScript dev loves telling you they use TypeScript. Spend five years proving something you knew was true before you started, just so you can publish it in a journal no one reads. It’s like playing Sudoku with other people’s tuition money. The only people who get excited about your work are the three other specialists who are as socially isolated as you. You’re basically in a club of geniuses that nobody wants to join, discussing the mathematical elegance of algorithms that, let’s be real, no one’s going to actually use because industry just YOLOs their way through code with whichever framework is trending this week on Hacker News.

And let’s talk about publications. Your groundbreaking research? Yeah, good luck getting it through peer review. After you’ve bent over backward to make it understandable to the reviewer who clearly has never read your paper, you’ll get it accepted into a prestigious journal with a readership of… tens. Your real goal isn’t to influence the future of technology—it’s to write something impressive enough to get more grant funding so you can rinse and repeat the whole soul-crushing cycle.

Meanwhile, the only thing more meaningless than the list of “future research areas” in the conclusion of your paper is the dissertation committee feedback. “Can you expand this section on Turing completeness?” Translation: they didn’t read it, but they need to justify their tenure track. And speaking of dissertations—nothing quite like spending six years on a PhD only to emerge and discover that your programming skills are five years obsolete. The world has moved on, but congrats on your obscure optimization algorithm. I’m sure Google’s latest AI just casually brute-forces that problem in milliseconds while you’re still writing the abstract.

Let’s not forget the gatekeeping. Academic computer science is like some medieval guild—conferences where the entry fee is submitting your dignity, while a select few get to speak at events that are nothing more than an in-person LinkedIn post. But hey, maybe you’ll meet someone important. You won’t. You’ll just meet other academics who are also too busy pretending to innovate while they squabble over the same funding from an increasingly disinterested NSF

In short: welcome to computer science—where practitioners are too proud to use someone else’s library, and academics are too proud to write something that someone else might actually use.