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Remember that some labs are more dysfunctional than others. Yours sounds pretty bad. My own experience at the same big crimson-colored university was considerab
by mechanical_fish 19y ago
Remember that some labs are more dysfunctional than others. Yours sounds pretty bad. My own experience at the same big crimson-colored university was considerably less bureaucratic -- we lost only about half a day per week to meetings, although there was still plenty of paper to be shuffled, between the grants and the articles and the manuscripts and the review manuscripts and the insane procurement process. And morale was rather higher, though perhaps not an order of magnitude higher.
The "wasting time on the Internet" factor should not be underestimated. Remember, the only reason we're all here is that Tim Berners-Lee spent a lot of his time fiddling around with the Internet instead of doing his physics research.
- timr 19y agoI'll add that the bureaucracy depends heavily on the size of the group. Biological research (in particular, anything that includes the word "systems" or "-omics" in the grant title) has been succumbing to an empire-building mentality for a long time. These programs tend to be large, highly bureaucratic, and well-funded (they're also, not incidentally, the groups most likely to have the resources to pay a staff programmer). Small groups are much more dependent on the productivity of each researcher. For example, it's not uncommon to see labs of 10 people publishing at roughly the same rate as groups of double or triple the size. Just like startups vs. big companies, the communication overhead of a small laboratory is much lower, and responsibility of each member, correspondingly higher.
- menloparkbum 19y agothe research group had both "systems" and "-omics" in its title!
- timr 19y agoWhat can I say? I'm psychic. ;-)