A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
It doesn’t matter the industry you’re in the Schmooze class will be there to make sure you have to bow to them.
It’s always hilarious how excited project managers are about sending their socially awkward developers to conferences like Pokémon off to battle
I choose you, Shyentist!
Shyentist used Facts and Data
...
It's not very effective.
Bloviator uses "lie!"
"We'll be 100% self driving in a year!"
It was very effective!
It's a lot different in academia vs industry for hard sciences. I currently work in industry, we have no options in the things we research but we are funded to the Moon. There is of course some amount of bowing we have to do in order to keep them quiet but that's about it.
In academia you have to secure your own funding constantly or your project just ends essentially. Academic institutions also look at metrics like impact factor and papers published/time that also effects the availability of funding. I know that people have had to stop pursuing doctorates due to funding issues. Politics in academia is notoriously horrendous.
That just what being a member of society is, lots of overhead.
Autistic people often face these challenges even outside of science.
Yup, this is every job. Your skills at performing a task are only a small part of success. The bigger part is being able to make friends with the right people.
Edison and Tesla come to mind. Edison wasn't the best when it came to electrical engineering but he was good at talking. Tesla was brilliant and is the father of modern electrical engineering but his best friend was a pigeon. During their lifetimes, Edison was much more successful than Tesla was.
Yeah, while I can relate to her plight, its pretty much the same situation when you do research in the industry and you want to get ahead in your career. Some things are different, but politics are still politics.
Completely ignoring qualification altogether in favor of nepotistic back scratching is actually not just being a member of society. IMO, HR should hide the identifying information of candidates from people making the hiring decisions so all they've got is the qualifications on the resume to judge them by.
"How do we stop the world's smartest people from realising what we're doing?"
"Let's make them fight among themselves and call it a meritocracy; we'll limit their funding and let them keep themselves busy with political infighting!"
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.
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.
"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.
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.
This "have to play political games to get ahead" bullshit seems to apply almost everywhere.
Yeah, humans are social animals which create social systems everywhere they go. This shouldn’t shock anyone.
They do. However, the quality of a person's work should be more important than their schmoozing skills. Not a shock, but definitely an annoyance.
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.
The fact that this is considered brutally honest is part of the problem. I think it's just regular honesty. Academia's standards for honesty are too low.
Read some Foucault for an explanation, that's just being human. You don't stop being human just because you follow scientific ideals. All human endeavors will follow human dynamics.
This is the fucking world. Like it or not it's about putting yourself out there and networking. Doesn't matter how bright you are. I wish it wasn't but it is.
I'm trying to imagine a job where being a disagreeable antisocial recluse is an advantage and I'm coming up blank.
That is hardly the idea the author is trying to give...
To put it bluntly, science costs money, and persuading people who control money to spend that money is itself a skill.
Or, zooming out, science requires resources: physical commodities, equipment, the skilled labor of entire teams. The most effective way to marshal those resources is with money, and management/sales skills are necessary to get those resources working together in concert.
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
Isn't it great when the social institutions regulating people who want to do science promote people with the skills of salesmen over people with the skills for doing science.
Yet another flawed system run by humans. Humans always ruining nice things.
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.
Many people I know get into it because of their idealism and desire to change the academic system for the better. They invest into this career, year after year, because it's always one more step until they can finally use their influence to change the system from the inside.
Sorry, unless you start your own sovereign country, you have to participate in society. Not everyone likes promoting themselves, disagreeing diplomatically, etc. Still, we play the game, even though I wish we didn't all have to...
Sadly not just the USA.
Sadly not just science, either.
Isn't this true for all jobs? Specially corporate jobs? It's still horrible, but that's capitalism for you.
The same problem exists in socialism
You need to convince people what you’re doing is worth doing. Whether that is economically or societally
why underline the whole thing
Well you see, if we made people read that irrelevant first sentence, and the beginning of the following paragraph, their heads might explode.
I'm arguably good at a lot of those things but didn't want to persue a PhD because you can see the writing on the wall when you're deep enough into academia. There's a system in place and boy it can get dark and shitty in a hurry.
Seeing this, it applies everywhere including something as trivial as a retail job. I wonder if that's why I too dislike that sort of backroom politicking so much.