This world is very difficult for people like me who are a little on the spectrum, since moving and shaking is what gets you places
this post was submitted on 29 May 2024
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Yes but didn't we all know that at some point before choosing that career? How do you get roughly 22 years into it - a PhD - and not know that academia is essentially a political rodeo and your research is going to be affected heavily by it? Didn't anyone whisper it to you confidentially in the back of some elective?
It most definitely shouldn't be, it's clearly poisonous to the idea of science, but it wasn't like a secret either. Like, it's "not ok" that that's the case, it's not something we should wave away as "just human things" - it should be addressed, it should be fixed. But it wasn't unknown.
There is no alternative if you actually want to do science and don't have millions of dollars to buy labs and materials and instruments. Science gets done in spite of everything she is describing.
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I think we can all broadly sympathize with the complaints about politicking, but this rant also includes a lot of red flags. For example, saying that you have “never had any interest” in things like “being agreeable when you disagree” suggests that this person is just another one of the big ego assholes in the department, a full-of-themselves “rockstar academic” who can’t even be bothered with basic human kindness.
"bUt PaRtIcIpAtInG iN sOcIeTy!", people with imposter syndrome who don't believe enough in their own abilities to be comfortable with the idea of merit alone judging advancement.
Why did she work for Pfizer than tho.
You can work for a big pharmaceutical without being the one who deals with the political side of things or you can eventually leave because you're tired of having to deal with it if it's part of your role and you would rather do actual research.
And would you look at that, from Wikipedia
In 2022, she left BioNTech to devote more time to research.
Lucky, not hero.
This is a person saying they don’t like what everyone else on the planet deals with daily.
Fortunately they were published enough to not have to care.
This is why socialism is the answer.
Imagine funding because science instead of margins for corporate investors. That's how Cuba made 12 COVID vaccines. And gave them away for free to the entire population and the global south as well. So yeah, downvote away lol.
My supervisor talked of Barnum and Bailey. He wasn't wrong, but glad I got out.
Science should be a worthy endeavour, currently it's not. Sell out for more...
Meritocracy? In my academics?
No thank you!
I'm all about the bureaucratic fiefdoms and intrapersonal drama politicking!
This is why good teams are essential. One person to do all the bullshitting, and the rest of the team to actually get stuff done while the bullshitter deflects all the other bullshitters.
"Bullshitting" is an essential skill, not a distraction. The greatest idea in the world is meaningless if nobody knows about it.
Marketing, scmoozing, etc gets a bad rep. But no matter how good your output, product, research, etc is, it has very little value or impact if people don't get on board.
If you can't play the game, team up with someone who can. And don't forget that while that schmoozer may not have your technical skills, they have a skillset you do not.
It wasn't Woz or Jobs. It was both.
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Ok so what happens when the bullshitter gets all the recognition and nobody believes you when you try to prove otherwise? Document and take legal action?
Seconded. The “face man” gets to be the public face and thereby a lot of the social credit and perhaps most of the work credit as well.
We see people like this all the time in management who take all the credit for the work from those who actually did the work.
I often describe the team like we're doing a heist. There's the planner, the face, the muscle, and so on. We'll have a social problem and I'll tell the face to go talk to the other team for us.
PROVIDED the bullshitter doesn’t turn inward. A PM with those skills unleashed on the team is hell, and is guaranteed to drive talent away.
Not an academic, but this is spot on for how I’ve felt as a top performer getting nowhere. This realization helped me reorient my aspirations to what I find truly matters to me: my family and hobbies. I’m a solid individual contributor. Over the years, my work has saved us millions and been adopted across the country, which is reward enough. The speaking engagements and schmoozing, I’ll leave that to the extroverts in the boys club.
Same. It physically hurts to see talentless suck-ups play the bullshit game and climb the hierarchy, whereas you get punished and kept down for pointing out the bullshit. My best decision ever was to escape the hell that is the field of software development, and instead get into teaching. Now my reward for a job well done is seeing my students succeed and I love it so much.
I know that feeling all too well. Funny enough, I’d thought about going into software dev because I thought it’d let me work alone more comfortably. Along the way I found a way to learn dev but apply it to my job instead, making me pretty unique at what I do. It lets me innovate, do deep research, and work on my own while being pretty openly anti-social. Luckily I have a boss who sees the value in me.
I can’t tell you the number of once-interns and junior managers, stuck-in-a-rut folks, that I’ve quietly influenced to senior or higher positions. It really does feel incredible! I call it “leading from the back.” I’ve been wanting to write a book on it - the introverts and individual-contributors who quietly (and happily) influence without being seen.
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@clearedtoland @fossilesque It makes perfect sense if you consider it. Imagine a closed system with two top performing components, where every other component is contributing to the system’s overall success. If one of these two top performers is able to connect and leverage all the other system components to amplify their work, but the other works in isolation, which is really producing more successful output when you measure the total system?
That's a pretty contrived setup. If the two top components are not factored into the performance of the whole and they are both defined by their ability to improve other components, then the one doing it's own thing is not, in fact, a top performer. It's task is to support others and it fails to do so.
And what if the loner's task is foundational? It doesn't have much direct output, but if he's gone and everything else goes to shit? Those ones are very hard to measure. I know, that's been my job for a good portion of my career. And things like that are common. Expecting a given performer, say an engineer, to also be good at public speaking has always struck me as impractical.
@maniclucky Yes, it's a contrived example. Its contrivance was to pose the point, which is:
Given two system components of comparable value, but different system impact, one still differentiates with regards to the surrounding system.
Also, given that the system itself is the body of recognition, the component with greater system impact is not only leveraged better, but also better positioned for being noticed doing it.
Also, a system can't see self-isolated participants. Not respectfully.
My problem with your example is that the loner didn't have comparable value. If it was supporting other things, then it failed. If it was doing something non obvious, it shouldn't be compared to the support. It feels fallacious, though I can't name one specifically.
System sight is itself an issue. Many companies evaluate an employee solely on some performance metric, typically tied to money. Because it's easy (and lazy).
I've had several positions where my task was to keep things running. I added no value, I prevented loss. And those positions get screwed because they're very difficult to quantify worth and very hard to see (and if it doesn't create money, they don't care). You only notice them when something goes wrong. Such an employee may keep everything running all year and get a "meets expectations" because there's an upper limit on how much contribution the system sees, and the system doesn't want to put in the effort to see better. I may have had to climb over an air handler to get to a transducer to calibrate, but that's not sexy and even if I report such effort, it's what I'm supposed to do (even if I wasn't, weekend nights are weird).
No one is going to write down "keep machine running 80% of the time" because people unassociated with the task will insist that 100% is the expectation, despite that being unreasonable.
A system built of people is not a black box. We can see them and evaluate them based on the task they're supposed to do, but the evaluators don't want to put in the effort to do their tasks in a way that means more work for them.
There's a comment to be made also about scope creep for a position so that a company doesn't have to hire marketing and engineering if they can get the engineers to do it. Despite them being suboptimal for the task. Something something down with unrestrained capitalism.
Ok. I've lost the plot at this point and made my point. Have a good one.
@maniclucky The issue I think that you're having here isn't that you're not making good points. Your points seem correct to me.
I think what's going on is that you're saying "there's nuance", and there clearly is, but I'm deliberately presenting a simple verbal model in order to be quick and to the point.
I do agree with you largely, but I think my point stands: two equal contributors to a system differentiate when just one contributor is friendlier to their host system. That becomes the edge.
What, my ~7 paragraphs isn't simple? /s
You're correct. I think I was chafing at the systems in question predisposing friendliness to mean modes that I personally am unskilled at or uncomfortable with despite my value.
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And this is actually a good thing that it's taught at Penn, as it doesn't lie to you and say, "just get high grades and you'll be the best in the world!"
Would have been nice if my university taught us that