[pc86]

> You do not want to be on the open labor market after 50

This might be true in something like software development (I don't strictly think it is but I'm at least open to the argument) but it's definitely not true in academia.

People want old professors. If anyone I'd expect it to be easier for a 50, 55, 60 year old professor to get a TT role than a 29 year old with a wet ink PhD.

[borroka]

How is this not true? Apart from specific disciplines with a permeable barrier between university and industry (for example, computer science, finance), the median age at which a tenured position is obtained should be between 30 and 35 years old (and I believe the variance of the distribution of ages to be small). It is very rare to get a tenured position at 40, and the chances are much slimmer for older people.

I think that most people who haven't spent time doing a PhD, doing post-docs, etc. have very misguided ideas about how the academic world works, and their notion of "professorship" comes mainly from movies.

Especially at R1 universities, researchers are hired primarily (90%+) for their research; teaching is very secondary. The "genius discovery" is the improbable outcome of their research; the most likely outcome is a substantial scholarship in some field, which is built up over time, initially individually (PhD, postdocs) and then collaboratively.