13 ms·

Biology needs more staff scientists

169 points by kungfudoi 9y ago

krapht 9y ago
You can't pay a staff scientist $20k a year like you can a graduate student. The article mentions that. I don't see the situation changing unless the supply of graduate student labor dries up. Hell, if I could hire grad-school quality new cs grads for 20k, I'd put up with the necessary mentoring and supervision they'd need.
- dekhn 9y ago
  A staff scientist at a National Lab is going to make $100K or more (cost-adjusted for the region; Berkeley likely pays more than Argonne, since the former is near SV, while the latter is an hour+ outside Chicago). A grad student is never a replacement for a staff scientist. Grad students aren't particularly useful until 4-5 years into a 7 year program, and then they're out in a couple years, so they can't do complex, long-running research.
  - arcanus 9y ago
    The labs don't employ many life scientists compared to physics and engineering doctorates. The article is focused on biology. Not that we don't generally need more staff scientists, but the national labs are probably the best gig along those lines available, and due to their mission, they are very focused on CS/Engineering /Physics In my limited experience, the life sciences are much more depressed in terms of wages.
    - dekhn 9y ago
      I was a staff scientists at a national lab (titled "Computer Scientist", but at the time, I was a biologist that used computers). We had plenty of people in LS (there are several divisions dedicated to biology). It grew a ton over the past few decades (true for all the labs). There is a modest difference in pay between a Staff Scientist in the Life Sciences Division and a Computer Scientist (doing life sciences) in the Computational division, but that's mainly explained by the fact that we had to compete with Silicon Valley to hire. Also, both CS and life sciences aren't hard funded like physics is (at least at LBL, dunno about others). I suppose what I'm saying supports you, in that I had to specifically be titled CS to get the higher salary. I would agree that in general, life sciences wages are depressed, but then, there are far more people in life sciences than CS, but much more demand for CS, and CS people bring in more dollars/hour (in terms of company revenue in the case of a biotech vs. a SV computer company). You can't fix that without making structural changes.
    - sndean 9y ago
      I'm a life scientist (I guess?) at a national lab. And yeah, even the biology is very focused toward CS/Eng/Physics. There's lots of unusual (at least relative to academia) collaborations, like biologists working with plasma physicists, deep learning researchers, material scientists, etc. Everyone here is paid equally, and pretty well (again, relative to academia).
- Fomite 9y ago
  Beyond that, there's just fewer ways to pay for staff scientists. There's no RA/TA lines available for them. There's no "training grant" for staff scientists, etc.
- s0rce 9y ago
  I think this is the core of the problem. Tons of people (even some who don't seem particularly qualified) are admitted to graduate science programs because they rely on the cheap labour to do research. These graduates, including the very talented ones, often have great difficulty finding permanent positions in Science (myself included). Unless there is a paradigm shift I can't see this changing either. Look at Medicine, as fas as I know the AMA controls the number of doctors that get educated, they aren't relying on cheap student/postdoc labor. In the end more of them gets jobs as doctors (unlike the large fraction of PhD scientists who leave academia/science entirely) and usually command substantially higher salaries that what PhDs make with similar amount of time spent in school.
oneshot908 9y ago
Um as someone with a Ph.D. in the life sciences: I can make close to 7-figures (amortized over a decade or so) pushing/enabling the AI/Cloud Computing agenda... or... I can make close to 6-figures (and stably so) working as a staff scientist... Gonna have to split the difference there IMO to grow the ranks. I am somehow reminded of the article complaining that retirees are hoarding cash instead of spending because they fear the future. How about constructing a society where I feel I should work for those 6-figures because it will bring a better future rather than compelled to chase 7-figures because the future is @#$%ing scary right now? Because that's what it's going to take for someone like me. And of course, I only speak for myself, but the data in that article about retirees makes me think I'm not the only one.
- austenallred 9y ago
  Close to 7 figures? How are you doing that math? (Genuinely curious)
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - xapata 9y ago
    > amortized over a decade or so
    - austenallred 9y ago
      Yes, I read that too. There are still an infinite number of ways that could break down.
  - oneshot908 9y ago
    Over ~2 decades... Join a lot of startups that ultimately fail, but which were doing the right sort of things... Some of them didn't fail... Repeat with ever-increasing ability to detect bozos...
    - lqdc13 9y ago
ThePhysicist 9y ago
Science in general needs more staff scientists. Currently the system is based mostly on "cheap" labor by students and postdocs who often work long hours for minimal pay in the hope of one day getting a real position. This is not only demotivating and unfair but also very inefficient, since labs will often tend to solve problems using manual labor instead of seeking more innovative solutions. Personally, I think a well-run lab needs a combination of staff scientists, very good engineers and salespeople, with one or more visionaries at the top who define the direction of work. OpenAI is a great example of how this can work (IMHO),as they have both excellent scientists but also brilliant engineers and people that are very good at selling their vision to the world.
- colechristensen 9y ago
  >Science in general needs more staff scientists Science needs to be better funded with fewer strings attached to dollars. How much of the abilities of our best scientific minds goes to writing grant proposals?
  - tertius 9y ago
    Science is very well funded in the U.S. Requiring selling your ideas is important to put funding where the good ideas are. Some are better at selling than others though. It's a competitive market as it should be. To weed out the ideas that shouldn't be funded. A better way to very ideas?
    - lacampbell 9y ago
      Applied science surely needs to rest on a healthy bedrock of pure science to draw ideas from. I don't think you can advance science purely by relying on what might have "real world" applications. It's a process of discovery. Also remember lots of "useless"/theoretical science turned out to have enormous real world uses.
      - tertius 9y ago
        My comment said nothing about "applied science" vs. "basic science." I'm actually talking about basic science. You can do basic science but have very bad ideas based on very poor data which you interpreted poorly. You shouldn't be funded. There are enough people with good ideas for basic science who should rather get the money.
sndean 9y ago
One issue: > All institutions should be like Broad (paraphrasing) > The Broad Institute attracts world-class scientists, as both faculty members and staff. HHMI's Janelia, the Salk Institute, and others that function like Broad can all attract world-class scientists. I'm skeptical that they're producing better/more interesting science because of their staff-scientist heavy model. A simpler explanation is that they attract better scientists and have almost unlimited funding.
- mattkrause 9y ago
  Money and talent certainly help, but the grad student/postdoc model also locks people into a certain kind of project where most of the work is done by 1-3 people over 1-3 years, with some extra bits done here and there by collaborators. This gets you a lot of underpowered experiments, bad analysis code, and tons of reduplicated effort as people scramble to finish up, publish, and move on.
  - chrisamiller 9y ago
    Indeed. The lack of continuity is killer, not just for the people working in that lab, but for science as a whole. That model is how we get shitty unsupported bioinformatics packages, experiments that no one can replicate, etc.
  - etrautmann 9y ago
    exactly this. This succinctly sums up exactly the problem I see as a PhD in biosciences aside from the Allen institute or other alternative models.
- leemailll 9y ago
  Any reason why you think janelia farm is staff-heavy model? From talks with people there I still have the impression it is PI based. A staff scientist there might just be a senior postdoc which is still different
  - sndean 9y ago
dnautics 9y ago
Just as a point of reference:. I got hired 'through the backdoor' at a research institute once. I applied for a ba/bs biologist position and got a substantial pay raise over the postdoc position I had prior. Eventually they converted me over to postdoc and with a pay raise with the promotion, I became the highest paid postdoc.
Animats 9y ago
Research organizations hate to admit it, but much of what they do would be considered "plant engineering" in heavy industry. Installing equipment, building tooling, connecting things up, and running the equipment are skilled work, but not research work. The physics community in their big-money "nuclear future" days was organized that way. I once worked in a large R&D facility for hydraulic equipment. The place was about 75% blue collar workers - good ones, because this was all one-off stuff, not production. Only about 20% of the work force had engineering degrees.
- comstock 9y ago
  Right, but most academic institutions would hire lab technicians to do those jobs. Actually, you probably wouldn't even trust a PhD student or junior postdoc to setup lab equipment...
bitL 9y ago
I know some unemployed PhDs in their late 30s that are always low-balled when looking for a job, looked down upon because they didn't manage to become successful titans of industry earlier... PhD is either a ticket to the highest echelon of the society or a life-long poverty.
- oneshot908 9y ago
  I remember when one of Craig Venter's startups offered me little more than post-doc money. When I turned them down, most of the people I interviewed with emailed me privately to ask for a referral to my new employer.
RichardHeart 9y ago
Women are doing pretty amazing at biology these days!
- RichardHeart 9y ago
  Is there a discipline of science they're excelling at further? I truly love progress, particularly medical, and the more hands on deck the better.
danieltillett 9y ago
Nothing is going to change until the people making the rules and awarding the grants stop getting all the money. The whole science funding process is rigged to favour senior scientists running a feudal hierarchy with themselves at the top. Actually what would be nice to try is a system like the way the polio vaccine was created. At the beginning there were a whole lot of technical and scientific questions that needed to be answered and the march of dimes organisation handed out grants to the various scientists to answer all these questions. One of the biggest problems with the current system is the knowledge gathered often has large gaps that make it impossible to use - no one wants to work on all the boring, gap-filling work that is critical to using a breakthrough.
- killjoywashere 9y ago
  One of my mentors told me, holding my grant application in his hand: "This (the funding org) is a mafia. Do you know how you fight the mafia? You build your own mafia." Project is going like gangbusters, no government money.
xaa 9y ago
My career goal is to be a staff scientist (in biology/bioinformatics). I hate writing grants and the related political bullshit. All I want is to do actual science, even if it means a marginal pay cut and some degree of decrease in autonomy -- although in practice, I'm not sure how much autonomy there actually in being a PI, where you are "autonomous" in that small portion of your time that doesn't involve raising money. I made a simple proposition to my PI: I'm skilled. I'm at least 3x as productive as a grad student (and I could make 10x in industry). You pay me 3x, and I'll work on your projects some of the time and mine some of the time. Give me (a realistic and workable level of) freedom, a living wage, and treat me right, and I'll stay here as long as I can. He agreed. It takes an experienced PI to understand just how much more value a staff scientist gives over a early-stage postdoc or grad student, which are cheaper. You get stability, expertise, and experience for what is ultimately not that high a price tag. I myself have watched my PI undergo this evolution. I have been with him 10 years, and in the early days, he was all about summer students etc. Now he knows that you simply cannot get real work done with cheap, temporary labor. I could get higher-paying or more prestigious jobs elsewhere. And I do believe I could cut it as a PI if I wanted. But I really, really value this arrangement.
- AlexCoventry 9y ago
  What problems are you working on?
  - xaa 9y ago
    My interest is in applying bioinformatics methods to understand aging. His is bioinformatics in general. So most of the time there is actually no conflict between "my" projects and "his" projects, my interests just being a subset of his. It doesn't hurt that my interests have introduced him to new people and funding mechanisms that he would not have otherwise had access to. I'm not sure how much detail you want. That was the short version. The slightly longer version is that there are huge datasets out there, and I want to understand aging by building tools and workflows for the many datasets which were not necessarily originally gathered to understand aging, but which still contain information about it. And also to work with and complement wet-lab aging researchers by giving them context or leads for experiments.
pishpash 9y ago
The academic market is distorted because of the withholding of final credentials (and for foreign students, the papers to be in the country). That alone suppresses wages and disincentivizes the hiring of staff scientists who demand the higher natural wage for the work performed. It is further distorted by lacing what would be a better collaborative allocation of resources with instead strong flavors of formalized individual protectionism, whether student or PI. So now your limited funding gets spread to 10 groups secretly doing the same thing and they have to take a lot of shortcuts to "win."
pvaldes 9y ago
We are ready to be hired; but the trend currently is to fill jobs with unpaid volunteers, ask for stupid requisites like Phd <30 Yo just because, and recruit retired professors to teach again for free. Therefore... thanks, but not thanks
carlob 9y ago
A few years back I was kinda in this role: I was contacted by an old professor of mine who didn't know I moved out of academia and into software. He had recently won a grant and wanted to hire me as a post doc. In the end we arranged things so I would work 1-2 day a week for them, while keeping my day job. I ended up helping a few other postdocs with their code. I do have a PhD in physics, but in that position I was free to ignore the deeper part of the science (like reading literature, figuring out hypotheses) and I would mostly concerned in helping them set up their numerical experiments, or symbolic computations.
whyenot 9y ago
Well, duh. It's a great job. I have a small lab. I have some limited funding to pursue my own research projects. I don't have to teach classes except for an occasional guest lecture. I don't have to serve on committees, or manage graduate students. It only took two years to get the staff equivalent of tenure. I have job security. Most importantly, I get to help a lot of people and collaborate on interesting projects. The downside is that the pay is rather poor, at least for me in the life sciences. Also don't expect to be treated with the same respect as tenured faculty.
En_gr_Student 9y ago
No they don't. They don't want or need them. It is one of the female dominated fields, and the pay is horrible. Economics 101, if you actually wanted it, you would pay for it. I cannot accept a field where it is reasonable to pay someone with a solid Bachelor of Science, recent grad, $12/hr. That is a joke, not a profession.
geebee 9y ago
Why haven't more research institutions expanded the roles of staff scientists? One reason is that they can be hard to pay for, especially by conventional means. Some funding agencies look askance at supporting this class of professionals; after all, graduate students and postdocs are paid much less. It's refreshing, in an article about needing more technical workers, to see at least some glimmer of a nod to the realities of supply and demand. I can't say this article quite recognizes this reality, but in its defense, we are talking about science, were people openly state they are motivated by the opportunity to do good work rather than salary alone. So, this is different from a startup founder looking to get rich complaining about a lack of engineers to hire, without mentioning pay. But not completely different, only a little different. "Biology needs more staff scientists." You sure you don't mean more programmers at low pay? Much of the work requires increasingly sophisticated programming ability, a skillset that is not really taught in or rewarded in an academic career path. It sounds like biology needs more people who will work for half of what they could make in industry, in a field structured to ensure they will never rise to leadership positions. I might as well say that biology needs more disposable young programmers who are willing to work for $5 an hour. I might as well say there is high unemployment among biology staff scientists who won't work for less than $250k a year. At a low salary, the market will demand a lot of a service, but there is little incentive to supply it. At a very high salary, the market will demand much less, but there will be. much higher incentive to supply it. There's also an elephant in the room here - university positions are often exempt from H1B caps, which means they can bring in programmers who aren't free to participate in free labor markets. As long as that is the case, don't expect supply and demand curves to meet. Markets only work if people are broadly free (not just to take another programmer position at a similar institution, but to leave the field, start a business, become an artist, install dry wall, sell real estate... you know, free, as in, well... free. I'm not sure there's any other way to put this). This is a strange thing, but here it goes - if you ever read an article about a "shortage" of workers in a field, be very careful about going into that field. It may mean that employers are looking for ways to gain coercive control over their workers lives, and to create a captive workforce that is not free to go into other fields. And that sort of control often spreads into abusive work relationships, poor working conditions, and other very ugly situations.

169 points by kungfudoi 9y ago

You can't pay a staff scientist $20k a year like you can a graduate student. The article mentions that. I don't see the situation changing unless the supply of graduate student labor dries up. Hell, if I could hire grad-school quality new cs grads for 20k, I'd put up with the necessary mentoring and supervision they'd need.

dekhn 9y ago
A staff scientist at a National Lab is going to make $100K or more (cost-adjusted for the region; Berkeley likely pays more than Argonne, since the former is near SV, while the latter is an hour+ outside Chicago). A grad student is never a replacement for a staff scientist. Grad students aren't particularly useful until 4-5 years into a 7 year program, and then they're out in a couple years, so they can't do complex, long-running research.
- arcanus 9y ago
  The labs don't employ many life scientists compared to physics and engineering doctorates. The article is focused on biology. Not that we don't generally need more staff scientists, but the national labs are probably the best gig along those lines available, and due to their mission, they are very focused on CS/Engineering /Physics In my limited experience, the life sciences are much more depressed in terms of wages.
  - dekhn 9y ago
    I was a staff scientists at a national lab (titled "Computer Scientist", but at the time, I was a biologist that used computers). We had plenty of people in LS (there are several divisions dedicated to biology). It grew a ton over the past few decades (true for all the labs). There is a modest difference in pay between a Staff Scientist in the Life Sciences Division and a Computer Scientist (doing life sciences) in the Computational division, but that's mainly explained by the fact that we had to compete with Silicon Valley to hire. Also, both CS and life sciences aren't hard funded like physics is (at least at LBL, dunno about others). I suppose what I'm saying supports you, in that I had to specifically be titled CS to get the higher salary. I would agree that in general, life sciences wages are depressed, but then, there are far more people in life sciences than CS, but much more demand for CS, and CS people bring in more dollars/hour (in terms of company revenue in the case of a biotech vs. a SV computer company). You can't fix that without making structural changes.
  - sndean 9y ago
    I'm a life scientist (I guess?) at a national lab. And yeah, even the biology is very focused toward CS/Eng/Physics. There's lots of unusual (at least relative to academia) collaborations, like biologists working with plasma physicists, deep learning researchers, material scientists, etc. Everyone here is paid equally, and pretty well (again, relative to academia).
Fomite 9y ago
Beyond that, there's just fewer ways to pay for staff scientists. There's no RA/TA lines available for them. There's no "training grant" for staff scientists, etc.
s0rce 9y ago
I think this is the core of the problem. Tons of people (even some who don't seem particularly qualified) are admitted to graduate science programs because they rely on the cheap labour to do research. These graduates, including the very talented ones, often have great difficulty finding permanent positions in Science (myself included). Unless there is a paradigm shift I can't see this changing either. Look at Medicine, as fas as I know the AMA controls the number of doctors that get educated, they aren't relying on cheap student/postdoc labor. In the end more of them gets jobs as doctors (unlike the large fraction of PhD scientists who leave academia/science entirely) and usually command substantially higher salaries that what PhDs make with similar amount of time spent in school.

oneshot908 9y ago

Um as someone with a Ph.D. in the life sciences: I can make close to 7-figures (amortized over a decade or so) pushing/enabling the AI/Cloud Computing agenda... or... I can make close to 6-figures (and stably so) working as a staff scientist... Gonna have to split the difference there IMO to grow the ranks. I am somehow reminded of the article complaining that retirees are hoarding cash instead of spending because they fear the future. How about constructing a society where I feel I should work for those 6-figures because it will bring a better future rather than compelled to chase 7-figures because the future is @#$%ing scary right now? Because that's what it's going to take for someone like me. And of course, I only speak for myself, but the data in that article about retirees makes me think I'm not the only one.

austenallred 9y ago
Close to 7 figures? How are you doing that math? (Genuinely curious)
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- xapata 9y ago
  > amortized over a decade or so
  - austenallred 9y ago
    Yes, I read that too. There are still an infinite number of ways that could break down.
- oneshot908 9y ago
  Over ~2 decades... Join a lot of startups that ultimately fail, but which were doing the right sort of things... Some of them didn't fail... Repeat with ever-increasing ability to detect bozos...
  - lqdc13 9y ago

ThePhysicist 9y ago

Science in general needs more staff scientists. Currently the system is based mostly on "cheap" labor by students and postdocs who often work long hours for minimal pay in the hope of one day getting a real position. This is not only demotivating and unfair but also very inefficient, since labs will often tend to solve problems using manual labor instead of seeking more innovative solutions. Personally, I think a well-run lab needs a combination of staff scientists, very good engineers and salespeople, with one or more visionaries at the top who define the direction of work. OpenAI is a great example of how this can work (IMHO),as they have both excellent scientists but also brilliant engineers and people that are very good at selling their vision to the world.

colechristensen 9y ago
>Science in general needs more staff scientists Science needs to be better funded with fewer strings attached to dollars. How much of the abilities of our best scientific minds goes to writing grant proposals?
- tertius 9y ago
  Science is very well funded in the U.S. Requiring selling your ideas is important to put funding where the good ideas are. Some are better at selling than others though. It's a competitive market as it should be. To weed out the ideas that shouldn't be funded. A better way to very ideas?
  - lacampbell 9y ago
    Applied science surely needs to rest on a healthy bedrock of pure science to draw ideas from. I don't think you can advance science purely by relying on what might have "real world" applications. It's a process of discovery. Also remember lots of "useless"/theoretical science turned out to have enormous real world uses.
    - tertius 9y ago
      My comment said nothing about "applied science" vs. "basic science." I'm actually talking about basic science. You can do basic science but have very bad ideas based on very poor data which you interpreted poorly. You shouldn't be funded. There are enough people with good ideas for basic science who should rather get the money.

sndean 9y ago

One issue: > All institutions should be like Broad (paraphrasing) > The Broad Institute attracts world-class scientists, as both faculty members and staff. HHMI's Janelia, the Salk Institute, and others that function like Broad can all attract world-class scientists. I'm skeptical that they're producing better/more interesting science because of their staff-scientist heavy model. A simpler explanation is that they attract better scientists and have almost unlimited funding.

mattkrause 9y ago
Money and talent certainly help, but the grad student/postdoc model also locks people into a certain kind of project where most of the work is done by 1-3 people over 1-3 years, with some extra bits done here and there by collaborators. This gets you a lot of underpowered experiments, bad analysis code, and tons of reduplicated effort as people scramble to finish up, publish, and move on.
- chrisamiller 9y ago
  Indeed. The lack of continuity is killer, not just for the people working in that lab, but for science as a whole. That model is how we get shitty unsupported bioinformatics packages, experiments that no one can replicate, etc.
- etrautmann 9y ago
  exactly this. This succinctly sums up exactly the problem I see as a PhD in biosciences aside from the Allen institute or other alternative models.
leemailll 9y ago
Any reason why you think janelia farm is staff-heavy model? From talks with people there I still have the impression it is PI based. A staff scientist there might just be a senior postdoc which is still different
- sndean 9y ago

dnautics 9y ago

Just as a point of reference:. I got hired 'through the backdoor' at a research institute once. I applied for a ba/bs biologist position and got a substantial pay raise over the postdoc position I had prior. Eventually they converted me over to postdoc and with a pay raise with the promotion, I became the highest paid postdoc.

Animats 9y ago

Research organizations hate to admit it, but much of what they do would be considered "plant engineering" in heavy industry. Installing equipment, building tooling, connecting things up, and running the equipment are skilled work, but not research work. The physics community in their big-money "nuclear future" days was organized that way. I once worked in a large R&D facility for hydraulic equipment. The place was about 75% blue collar workers - good ones, because this was all one-off stuff, not production. Only about 20% of the work force had engineering degrees.

comstock 9y ago
Right, but most academic institutions would hire lab technicians to do those jobs. Actually, you probably wouldn't even trust a PhD student or junior postdoc to setup lab equipment...

bitL 9y ago

I know some unemployed PhDs in their late 30s that are always low-balled when looking for a job, looked down upon because they didn't manage to become successful titans of industry earlier... PhD is either a ticket to the highest echelon of the society or a life-long poverty.

oneshot908 9y ago
I remember when one of Craig Venter's startups offered me little more than post-doc money. When I turned them down, most of the people I interviewed with emailed me privately to ask for a referral to my new employer.

RichardHeart 9y ago

Women are doing pretty amazing at biology these days!

RichardHeart 9y ago
Is there a discipline of science they're excelling at further? I truly love progress, particularly medical, and the more hands on deck the better.

danieltillett 9y ago

Nothing is going to change until the people making the rules and awarding the grants stop getting all the money. The whole science funding process is rigged to favour senior scientists running a feudal hierarchy with themselves at the top. Actually what would be nice to try is a system like the way the polio vaccine was created. At the beginning there were a whole lot of technical and scientific questions that needed to be answered and the march of dimes organisation handed out grants to the various scientists to answer all these questions. One of the biggest problems with the current system is the knowledge gathered often has large gaps that make it impossible to use - no one wants to work on all the boring, gap-filling work that is critical to using a breakthrough.

killjoywashere 9y ago
One of my mentors told me, holding my grant application in his hand: "This (the funding org) is a mafia. Do you know how you fight the mafia? You build your own mafia." Project is going like gangbusters, no government money.

xaa 9y ago

My career goal is to be a staff scientist (in biology/bioinformatics). I hate writing grants and the related political bullshit. All I want is to do actual science, even if it means a marginal pay cut and some degree of decrease in autonomy -- although in practice, I'm not sure how much autonomy there actually in being a PI, where you are "autonomous" in that small portion of your time that doesn't involve raising money. I made a simple proposition to my PI: I'm skilled. I'm at least 3x as productive as a grad student (and I could make 10x in industry). You pay me 3x, and I'll work on your projects some of the time and mine some of the time. Give me (a realistic and workable level of) freedom, a living wage, and treat me right, and I'll stay here as long as I can. He agreed. It takes an experienced PI to understand just how much more value a staff scientist gives over a early-stage postdoc or grad student, which are cheaper. You get stability, expertise, and experience for what is ultimately not that high a price tag. I myself have watched my PI undergo this evolution. I have been with him 10 years, and in the early days, he was all about summer students etc. Now he knows that you simply cannot get real work done with cheap, temporary labor. I could get higher-paying or more prestigious jobs elsewhere. And I do believe I could cut it as a PI if I wanted. But I really, really value this arrangement.

AlexCoventry 9y ago
What problems are you working on?
- xaa 9y ago
  My interest is in applying bioinformatics methods to understand aging. His is bioinformatics in general. So most of the time there is actually no conflict between "my" projects and "his" projects, my interests just being a subset of his. It doesn't hurt that my interests have introduced him to new people and funding mechanisms that he would not have otherwise had access to. I'm not sure how much detail you want. That was the short version. The slightly longer version is that there are huge datasets out there, and I want to understand aging by building tools and workflows for the many datasets which were not necessarily originally gathered to understand aging, but which still contain information about it. And also to work with and complement wet-lab aging researchers by giving them context or leads for experiments.

pishpash 9y ago

The academic market is distorted because of the withholding of final credentials (and for foreign students, the papers to be in the country). That alone suppresses wages and disincentivizes the hiring of staff scientists who demand the higher natural wage for the work performed. It is further distorted by lacing what would be a better collaborative allocation of resources with instead strong flavors of formalized individual protectionism, whether student or PI. So now your limited funding gets spread to 10 groups secretly doing the same thing and they have to take a lot of shortcuts to "win."

pvaldes 9y ago

We are ready to be hired; but the trend currently is to fill jobs with unpaid volunteers, ask for stupid requisites like Phd <30 Yo just because, and recruit retired professors to teach again for free. Therefore... thanks, but not thanks

carlob 9y ago

A few years back I was kinda in this role: I was contacted by an old professor of mine who didn't know I moved out of academia and into software. He had recently won a grant and wanted to hire me as a post doc. In the end we arranged things so I would work 1-2 day a week for them, while keeping my day job. I ended up helping a few other postdocs with their code. I do have a PhD in physics, but in that position I was free to ignore the deeper part of the science (like reading literature, figuring out hypotheses) and I would mostly concerned in helping them set up their numerical experiments, or symbolic computations.

whyenot 9y ago

Well, duh. It's a great job. I have a small lab. I have some limited funding to pursue my own research projects. I don't have to teach classes except for an occasional guest lecture. I don't have to serve on committees, or manage graduate students. It only took two years to get the staff equivalent of tenure. I have job security. Most importantly, I get to help a lot of people and collaborate on interesting projects. The downside is that the pay is rather poor, at least for me in the life sciences. Also don't expect to be treated with the same respect as tenured faculty.

En_gr_Student 9y ago

No they don't. They don't want or need them. It is one of the female dominated fields, and the pay is horrible. Economics 101, if you actually wanted it, you would pay for it. I cannot accept a field where it is reasonable to pay someone with a solid Bachelor of Science, recent grad, $12/hr. That is a joke, not a profession.

geebee 9y ago

Why haven't more research institutions expanded the roles of staff scientists? One reason is that they can be hard to pay for, especially by conventional means. Some funding agencies look askance at supporting this class of professionals; after all, graduate students and postdocs are paid much less. It's refreshing, in an article about needing more technical workers, to see at least some glimmer of a nod to the realities of supply and demand. I can't say this article quite recognizes this reality, but in its defense, we are talking about science, were people openly state they are motivated by the opportunity to do good work rather than salary alone. So, this is different from a startup founder looking to get rich complaining about a lack of engineers to hire, without mentioning pay. But not completely different, only a little different. "Biology needs more staff scientists." You sure you don't mean more programmers at low pay? Much of the work requires increasingly sophisticated programming ability, a skillset that is not really taught in or rewarded in an academic career path. It sounds like biology needs more people who will work for half of what they could make in industry, in a field structured to ensure they will never rise to leadership positions. I might as well say that biology needs more disposable young programmers who are willing to work for $5 an hour. I might as well say there is high unemployment among biology staff scientists who won't work for less than $250k a year. At a low salary, the market will demand a lot of a service, but there is little incentive to supply it. At a very high salary, the market will demand much less, but there will be. much higher incentive to supply it. There's also an elephant in the room here - university positions are often exempt from H1B caps, which means they can bring in programmers who aren't free to participate in free labor markets. As long as that is the case, don't expect supply and demand curves to meet. Markets only work if people are broadly free (not just to take another programmer position at a similar institution, but to leave the field, start a business, become an artist, install dry wall, sell real estate... you know, free, as in, well... free. I'm not sure there's any other way to put this). This is a strange thing, but here it goes - if you ever read an article about a "shortage" of workers in a field, be very careful about going into that field. It may mean that employers are looking for ways to gain coercive control over their workers lives, and to create a captive workforce that is not free to go into other fields. And that sort of control often spreads into abusive work relationships, poor working conditions, and other very ugly situations.