Re: modern science = underfunded projects



On Fri, 24 Feb 2006, drocillo wrote:


At our natll lab, we have morning and afternoon tea breaks. Many of my
senior colleagues (in the ir 50s) complain loudly and repeatedly that
the management wants them to do more with less, and at the moment they
are so seriously underfunded that there is no way they could do a
certain new project. They have financing for some projects, and the
management is currently dumping on them the project which has no
funding for equipment. So far, they managed to complete the similar
requests by taking some funding off the other projects they ran, but
this time it is too bizzare.

I was listening to them, and I thought that I was no stranger to such a
situation. In virtually all of my previous after-PhD employments at
university and natl lab, I was given a seriously underfunded project. I
had to be resourceful to find some particular solutions which were
cheap. In most of the cases, it still was not enough, so I (we) had to
be creative in writing the reports pretending that we solved the
initial problem, while in reality we solved a much less challenging
problem.

A thought has occured to me that this is the way the western science is
going. Every scientific employee will be faced with the task to
complete the underfunded project. Those who are unable to give account
of the successful completion of the project, will fade into oblivion as
the management will hire and promote the people who have proved they
can finish the principically underfunded projects.

This also means that younger scientists on large will not be able to
obtain professional skills because doing underfunded projects does not
put them to work with the real equipment and they do not solve the real
problems. The fraction of computer modellers in science will increase
(though even now it is too much).

The number of the scientists who possess the true skills will be very
small, and their value will go up. The salary for the people who were
exposed to the real-funded projects will go up to stratospheric
heights. So... people on this newsgroup talked a lot that the labour of
scientists is not respected and is not paid well... here is the good
news...

Is this a true trend, or I am just imagining unexisting things ?

There is cost pressure everywhere. Before the end of the Cold War, I heard no complaints from people I knew who were in our defense establishement. Then they started telling me "You would not believe what we do now to get a contract".

The guys I knew with permanent jobs (eg. CIA) only complained about what they can do to get a promotion (not doing their jobs well, and there have been books written on this).

The worse situation are the non-tenured faculty whose job security depends absolutely on grant funding (i.e. no grant means no paycheck, and even if you have a grant, if the chair or dean does not like you, then it is irrelevant, you go _out_).

In private industry, the only guys who are doing well are the executives, lawyers, and other peripheral high paid guys (including a whole raft of scam artists [I consider recruiters as on the borderline]).

\/


.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: modern science = underfunded projects
    ... the management wants them to do more with less, ... I was given a seriously underfunded project. ... put them to work with the real equipment and they do not solve the real ... The number of the scientists who possess the true skills will be very ...
    (sci.research.careers)
  • Re: modern science = underfunded projects
    ... the management wants them to do more with less, ... I was given a seriously underfunded project. ... put them to work with the real equipment and they do not solve the real ... The number of the scientists who possess the true skills will be very ...
    (sci.research.careers)
  • modern science = underfunded projects
    ... At our natll lab, we have morning and afternoon tea breaks. ... the management wants them to do more with less, ... I was given a seriously underfunded project. ... The number of the scientists who possess the true skills will be very ...
    (sci.research.careers)
  • Re: no outcome on job interview yet
    ... In another case, I had a meeting which, for all intents and purposes was an interview, and then was told three days later that "the focus of the job had changed". ... exclusively about the techniques which I had almost no experience in, ... for scientists. ... Not that I had problems with that; the management ...
    (sci.research.careers)
  • Re: This recession said to be the worst in decades...
    ... They said the lab did not lay off people. ... and those people popped up in the govt jobs in the lab. ... I believe the lab's management created the positions for their cronies ... He says that the "junior scientists" can do jobs as good, ...
    (sci.research.careers)