4 ms·

This is a good article. However, in the US there is a flip side to hardware purchase optimization -- labor costs. It is sad (or infuriating, if I paid for it) t

• cryoshon 8y ago
  agreed entirely. labor costs are nearly always discounted in the life sciences from my experience. there's two origins of this phenomena. the first is that people are accustomed to having graduate students, or worse, being graduate students in the sciences. people abuse their time and treat it as though it is valueless, and that habit persists in them when they become leaders. then, the habit percolates downward to people who were never graduate students. viola, you now have an entire group of people with no conception of opportunity cost or labor costs. the second origin is that scientists who are managers typically would rather have something "just work" (read: be jerry rigged and not work very well) than have to purchase a solution. this is another holdover from the graduate student days. buying solutions is expensive, and you still need to spend time to set it up and potentially troubleshoot. getting someone to make a one-time solution that is a totally incomprehensible mess is preferable if it is cheaper. besides, the manager scientist doesn't have to deal with the external time cost to their staff. the sad thing is that all of these people involved are very smart and far-too-hard working. these are great traits to have. but they do not always result in the best solution. working hard is not always worth the economic cost to the group... nor is developing a one-shot ingenious solution. terrifyingly, few lab managers or leaders outside of big pharma seem to understand these problems.
  • ISL 8y ago
    It's not just the life sciences. Time is generally undervalued in physics, too. The most-successful scientists, though, have an excellent perception of the value of time. They may not perceive it that way explicitly, but their choices of what is and is not worth working on amount to valuing time.
• Spooky23 8y ago
  That depends on the place. Depending on the workload, if you have lots of salaried folks with work that is variable, you're getting a cost savings on acquisition and picking up some morale. Buying that $200 part may also result in spending $3,000 in labor for the bureaucracy process. If everyone is always engaged with some other activity, and you're hiring people to do miscellaneous tasks, that's a different story.
• PoachedSausage 8y ago
  As someone that works in a high energy particle physics lab, I have a slightly different perspective on this. There does increasingly seem to be a sort of anti-not-invented-here bias to externally buying off-the-shelf solutions, this has resulted in lots of equipment in storage that simply does not do what it was specified for, essentially expensive paper weights. It is also causing a lack of knowledge and skills development for new scientists and engineers. Big problems are looming as lots of our scientists and engineers with their 30+ years of knowledge are retiring soon, the new generation need to be allowed to develop knowledge and expertise though their own designs, not just buy stuff in. Imagine if we had said to the authors of Art of Electronics in their early days, hey guys don't bother designing all this instrumentation, we'll just buy it in from National Instruments, what a loss that would have been.
  • ptero 8y ago
    I agree with this in principle and it also mirrors my own experience during a PhD program: time is cheap, tinkering is learning, etc. This is especially true in academia research, which is, in most disciplines, helped by wiring things up in ingenious ways. Practicing those skills comes very useful. Robert Wood probably would not become such a great experimental physicist if he did not tinker with hardware as a youngster. The problem is that this approach does not scale: you can build everything from scratch, but beyond certain complexity you need existing subcomponents. Nuclear physicists do not need to learn gear tooth shapes and build their own servos. And in my experience people are bad at making the decision when to stop building and start buying. Maybe a better approach is something like 80/20 split: spend 20% of time building own designs and instrumentation and 80% on target research. And those who are really good at building from scratch and love it can spend more time on it.
• rcdmd 8y ago
  Interesting. My PI in undergrad had several R01s and we were swimming in funds but their spending categories were restricted. $50000 to us on labor may have been worth it for $25000 in equipment, for instance. He did, however, refuse to tap the large startup fund, which could have been spent however he wanted and instead saved it for a rainy day. On the other hand, we had a very strong "core/shared" support and could basically rent equipment. With the amount of money he was spending on the core, we had a huge influence on the equipment purchased. Also, we collaborated with other groups helping their projects, gaining access to their equipment for our projects. Basically, trading our labor for their equipment.
• exolymph 8y ago
  Strikes me as a principal-agent problem. He's not responsible for the budget that encompasses his salary.
• agumonkey 8y ago
  True but good to keep this in mind too, for the few times when DIY will be the only left solution. I suspect some people to never do something if it's not on the shelves.