[throwawaygh]

> the privilege is being able to get a salary without caring about his activity that adds the most value for society... working most of your time documenting why you should get a promotion... But it's one of the many very real problems academia has nowadays.

There are 4,000 colleges and universities in the US. At the VAST majority of those institutions -- perhaps 80% -- professors spend 40 hours per week teaching courses. They teach 3 university courses per semester with 40-400 students per course, with the lower enrollment courses requiring a pretty heavy lift per student (lots of office hours, labor-intensive grading of proofs or long papers or large programs, etc). That's 40 hours of work, sometimes more.

Hacker news massively over-estimates the number of "elite R1 faculty" and under-estimates the number of faculty who are essentially just college teachers.