Publish or Perish

Publish or perish, unfortunately. If you lack the pubs, you won't get tenure. If you don't get tenure, you're shown the door. Sometimes research is actually not well understood and not published, but most of the time if it's not accepted to more mainline publications (and there are many non-predatory venues that are "easy publications") it's probably garbage. I get emails asking me to submit to bizarro conferences in strange places now and again. I think they scraped my info off publication

How can you be a post-doc without publishing?

Maybe having few good papers/conference talks?

Easy, in academia you can be the (co)author of a paper you've never even read.

What is considered a paper in CS is different than in many other fields. That is not to say the content is not worthy of publication, just that they tend to be shorter and often are more focused on a single issue. There are also publications in conference proceedings that are usually an easier review process. Looking at his top 10 by citation count on google scholar shows most in proceedings and under 10 pages. Arguably it is more intellectual work, but the process is less arduous so the rate is

This is not a technology problem. People send their papers to reputable journals because of their reputation and journals have a good reputation because everybody wants to publish there. Getting papers into a big journal is nearly the only benchmark academics have when it comes to getting a job or tenure.

Has he published any peer reviewed papers on it?

What any researcher needs to accomplish: more publications

Because people have to publish papers, that's why.

Zero other (english) publications by the author in the Cornell archive and only four references within. Not an indicator as to whether the paper is correct (I haven't read it), but that's "smelly".