This doesn’t describe post tenure academia. You seem to be describing the life of a young tenured track academic.

Additionally while Knuth is clearly an outlier by any measure he’s also an outlier in his celebrity. There are a lot Knuths out there who aren’t well known outside their specialty, or are in industry. He played a seminal role in a field everyone studies in computer science and published a uniquely interesting and continuously revised set of fundamental books in the field. However in my time in academics there were people in say transactional memory for speculative out of order compute whose work powers every machine in use today and they still contribute similarly powerful work. They’re obsessive and very driven by the problem space. But for everyone one of those in academia there are a hundred tenured professors who paper mill their undergrads (generously).

You mention long hours but I said obsessive. That’s orders of magnitude more than working hard. It’s so distorted as to be pathological if they weren’t paid and rewarded for it. Yes many academics are pathologically obsessive. But unless they are bringing in funding or repute to fill a deficit in the department, there’s no work for them in current academic settings.

Finally Knuth isn’t a common occurrence because -he doesn’t bring in money-. Modern academia is oriented towards grant milking. The example of the txn memory guy is interesting because he brings in lots of research funding from intel and ARM and NVidia because his work is very commercial. Knuth - not so much I imagine. He brings repute, but you can only find so much repute with modern academic funding models before they’re a net negative on the department. Knuth is a fossil of a different era in academics (not used as a pejorative).

> That doesn't sound right to me at all. Modern academia is highly competitive, and career academics typically have long working hours. > If they aren't doing programming, that's likely because it isn't relevant to their job. A theoretical computer scientist is closer to a mathematician than to a typical programmer.

This kind of stuff is not useful to be posting where impressionable people (young students) can read it. The truth the majority of academics are managers and delegate hands-on work to postdocs and PhD students. I finished a PhD just last month and I never saw in 4 years anyone on my committee so much as look at code let alone write it (and I was not a theory student). Almost everyone in my cohort would echo this observation.