I think that this article points to a general challenge with our education system. By and large, the people who stick with training all the way through a PhD an

I think that this article points to a general challenge with our education system. By and large, the people who stick with training all the way through a PhD and postdoc in a complex field are not hoping about being a cog in someone else's machine. In academia, I've observed that the sign that that a trainee is ready to move on to independence is that they begin to have disagreements with their mentor that don't reflect misunderstandings of fact, but rather proper, interesting diverging hypotheses. In this story, the wiring incident reminding me of this. The problem is that solving these sorts of hard problems require both leaders and workers. In this case, and many others, there is not an educational path for training people to be technicians with equivalent knowledge as a PhD (which is why they poached an academic lab to do this). Moreover, if there was a path, history has shown that the people that accept the follower role (rather than wanting intellectual leadership) are highly dispensable. (See, e.g., the optics industry moving laser fab to Malaysia.) It's also a problem in medicine - physicians resist loss of diagnostic or treatment control. Though in medicine, there are NPs and PAs, but they're generally treated with much less respect. I think it's interesting that he talks about how "he" Martinis was doing the wiring. Was he? I suspect he had a team working very hard with substantial responsibility, but...