"Settlement of the ASN has sparked an acrimonious debate in and out of Italian academia. People who were denied the scientific qualification despite possessing all requisites lamented academic boycott towards those who do not belong to academic circles. However, those who were granted the qualification were not in a better position than those without the qualification if they did not have an academic sponsor. Although highly qualified, they are likely to succumb to inferior competitors who are already settled in Italian academia. Indeed, the toxic mix of inadequate competitive financing in the higher education system and a high amount of corruption have made Italy a case study in discrimination and favouritism in faculty recruitment." (Source: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(17)30513-5).

ASN is not easy, and I think it can be challenging to achieve without doing full-time research in academia. It effectively requires a mature resume with a solid track record of publications, experience with professional service, project management, technology transfer, and so on. It has changed the way of thinking about research in Italy. On the one hand, I believe it has imposed such a strict selection so that inadequate people can no longer enter academia, even with favoritism (or at least it isn't effortless). On the other hand, it has imposed a too-quantitative evaluation, which is slowly eroding Universities as places of culture, transforming them into productive realities. This is in line with the "publish or perish" motto, which evolved into "publish and perish", as the need to overcome certain thresholds and the intrusiveness of bureaucracy take away freedom from research, making it less and less courageous and increasingly linked to "safe" and "immediate" applications. 

Another problem with ASN is that it paradoxically doesn't care about teaching activities. This is fair with the assumption that it is a scientific qualification; however, it is a requirement to become a professor (!). Contrary to other countries, in Italy, lecturers and researchers are not distinct figures, so even those who love to teach much more than research cannot be evaluated based on this. Some argue that the two figures should be distinct. I am not entirely convinced: especially in a rapidly evolving field like Computer Science, teaching can help to do better research while doing research can help to teach better. However, teaching should also be given more consideration. I don't have the skills to find a solution, but student satisfaction, now usually measured with questionnaires, should be considered much more.

Finally, the real problem of doing research in Italy is the scarcity of financial resources, so supply is much lower than demand. The career path is very competitive and generally requires about ten years of precariousness and uncertainty about the future, even in the most fortunate cases. In less fortunate circumstances, even brilliant people can stay out of academia, perhaps too old to quickly enter the job market. Hence the well-known phenomenon of "brain drain" for which many brilliant researchers leave Italy, which is not counterbalanced by the arrival of researchers from abroad.