More anecdotal evidence: while writing my Master's thesis it became clear that my advisor (the dept. head) was quite interested in the subject matter, and repeatedly asked me to shelve it, do a quick-and-dirty thesis to graduate and return to working on my original draft during a PhD. I was very open to the idea, since I was in love with research ever since childhood.<p>We sat down and talked about what this meant in particular, the workload, compensation, options after graduating from the PhD program.<p>It broke my heart, but I had to turn him down. It felt like everybody who wanted to have a shot at having a career in academia needed to put an insane (read: literally destructive) amount of effort into it, all while accepting that it was extremely easy to get stuck for good. There is extreme pressure on postdocs to produce results, with institutions and labs becoming very cautious about working with people in their 2nd or 3rd postdocs if they hadn't published in high-impact journals until then. Also, good luck finding any sort of tenured positions, with more and more universities switching to freelance "collaborators".<p>I was not going to spend 80 hours a week investing in something where all odds are stacked against me. I was not going to put years of my life into a thing that can go 'poof' just because your stars didn't align, or because the faculty decided instead of hiring you on a professorship track, they would rather extort some more money and "let the contracts expire" when it was no longer convenient to have you there.