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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-

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.

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.