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I can feel him. It is not just in science, but in business as well. People want results, not understand their problems. And they want them yesterday, despite on
by erikb 10y ago
I can feel him. It is not just in science, but in business as well. People want results, not understand their problems. And they want them yesterday, despite only telling you about it today. In some regards it's just a trick to keep you working hard for them. But still it's neither fun nor actually productive.
It's great to work with freelancers though, since from the good ones you can learn how to handle that situation: Don't give users, customers, management enough information to really control you, understand that you are the one providing the results or not, and don't talk about your work but only about that part of the results that they actually care about. This way they don't consider you unproductive or incompetent, but that they need you. They still hate you, but they hate you because they need you. And that you can use to actually solve problems, take the time you need, and thereby provide the results they really need.
- return0 10y ago> but in business as well I think business is more ruthless. It won't let you waste too much time in a false belief that your product or science will become successful. That leads to faster iteration.
- erikb 10y agoMaybe yeah. I haven't worked in science yet, so zero experience with that. In any case the feeling may be the same though. If the "super productive" business is faster than the "super productive" science, then the old school business was probably also faster than old school science.
- pcrh 10y agoIn the pharmaceutical business at least, huge sums of money are frequently spent on strategies that even graduate students could point out as being unlikely to succeed. The reasoning behind these unproductive decisions is almost always "markets".
- adrianratnapala 10y agoCan you elaborate on how this works? Do you mean there is (in effect) some kind of market for vapourware, so companies work on things that sound good even though they predictably can't work? Who benefits?
- pcrh 10y agoThe people who benefit are those who can raise funds/support for the next round. It is more difficult to obtain objective evidence about biological sciences and its subset, medicine, than other fields such as maths or chemistry. This is due to the inherent complexity and poorly understood processes by which living organisms thrive, or not. So, there is abundant interest from non-experts (i.e. potential investors or market analysts) in gaining a slice of attractive markets such as currently unmet conditions e.g. lung cancer or Alzheimer's disease. Such people are sometimes more easily swayed by the proclamations of "famous professors" than graduate students might be. So, yes, there is in effect a lot of "vapourware" in the drug business. And much of it succeeds precisely because there is insufficient expertise on the behalf of investors, who get their knowledge of the underlying science third hand, or worse.
- hilop 10y agoThe OP topic is complaining that acedemia is too reluctant too fund things that are unlikely to succeed.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoScience isn't meant to be done in order to become "successful" short-term. As for businesses, I'd argue that iterating too fast "because markets" can lead to your product doing nothing useful but exploiting market microstructure to make money - i.e. you start to build throwaway shit that waste peoples' time, but they figure it out only after they pay you.
- boggydepot 10y ago> People want results, not understand their problems. Software Managers more commonly known as PM