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Science has enough money, but is it not efficiently used. Actual researchers are post docs on minimal salary. Most money gets redirected to HR, administrators,
by jankotek 7y ago
Science has enough money, but is it not efficiently used. Actual researchers are post docs on minimal salary. Most money gets redirected to HR, administrators, ISO compliance etc...
- umvi 7y ago> but is it not efficiently used This is the case with a lot of organizations like charities and government contractors. When you have so many layers between the money source and sink, each layer takes some % cut like a parasite and each layer fights for its survival like a parasite. It's like how healthcare.gov could have been made by 4 people in a garage being paid $100k/year each, but instead it required billions of dollars and thousands of people.
- Ididntdothis 7y agoI agree that a lot of money is being wasted but your estimate of 4 people is very naive.
- umvi 7y agoWhat makes healthcare.gov so complicated that 4 people can't handle it? Less is more in software. Some of the best software ever written was written by one person (or a very small team). The more people you add to a project the less cohesive the code base becomes and the fewer people there are that can see the big picture.
- Ididntdothis 7y agoThere are tons of regulations for the whole country and each state. Then you have to deal with all insurers. I bet it took hundreds of man years just to get a handle on all the requirements. This is not some photo sharing site where you can make the rules. The rules are already set and you have to figure them out. Basically the tech is the easy part but understanding the requirements is very hard. This applies to a lot of big systems. It’s hard to create a coherent system around convoluted rules.
- umvi 7y agoAnd yet, the complaints about the website were not about the lack of regulatory compliance, dealing with insurers, etc., but of basic technical issues - logging in, navigating the site, "glitches".
- Ididntdothis 7y agoCorrect. They certainly could have done better but my point was that this is not something four guys in a basement can nail together.
- umvi 7y agoWell, I still think 4 guys in a basement could have come up with a better framework to build off of even without the regulatory compliance part. It's like the company Simplifile - small company in Utah. They have only a handful of developers that build actual website front/backend infrastructure, and then they have a team of specialists whose job it is to become expert in all of the county laws across the USA and create requirements out of them.
- radus 7y agoYou're speaking from experience? In my bio-ish field most of the money gets used to purchase reagents and to maintain mouse colonies.
- jankotek 7y agoYes, my friends work as lab rats in marine chemistry.
- jrumbut 7y agoAll that now looks very cheap with a large percentage of the economy shut down, no good solution in sight, and a bunch of PhDs in relevant fields working as data scientists for advertising companies or pricing derivatives on Wall Street after they couldn't find a sustainable job in research.