[impendia]

At Harvard it really is easy to stop worrying, if you have an open mind.

As a mathematician, I know excellent academics who narrowly missed getting tenured at MIT and Princeton. They were highly in demand, and are now happily working at other top-20 universities.

(ed: I am in math, and described what I observed. I see elsewhere in the thread that mdwelsh observed the opposite.)

[mdwelsh]

You are right that being a mathematician at Harvard, it hardly matters if you get tenure or not. (In fact, for a long time you basically had to win the Fields Medal to get tenure in math at Harvard). Harvard is nowhere near as well known in Computer Science, and is more of a "top 20" rather than "top 5" school.