4 ms·

Hate to break it to you, but "an incompetent person rising through the ranks quickly before crashing and burning" is something that happens in pretty literally

Hate to break it to you, but "an incompetent person rising through the ranks quickly before crashing and burning" is something that happens in pretty literally every large org. Any 60 year old organization with a large budget is going to have multiple instances of this happening.

dnautics 6y ago
Perhaps I have a flair for the dramatic, but consider my statement that I haven't met a competent pm in the division I was in (n~5). The incentives are not that well-aligned. Think about it this way. If you're really smart, why do you become a DARPA PM, and not a PI? Yes there are a few good reasons, but the population it applies to have largely been selected out by the postdoc phase (where I would say you have had sufficient experience with crushing scientific and engineering failure onself and watching others to be effective) and the pool of candidates therefore is vanishing.
- throwawaygh 6y ago
  > If you're really smart, why do you become a DARPA PM, and not a PI? Reasons are myriad. 100% of the PMs I've worked with had tenure and successful labs prior to becoming PMs, and went back to their institution & restarted their labs after leaving DARPA. The reason for leaving your lab to be PM is fairly obvious: controlling the funding gives you a lot of leverage for shaping the priorities of the field, in a way that merely running your own lab doesn't. Maybe your division sucked. I've only ever worked with highly competent PMs, and all of the programs I've worked on ended in commercialization. Anyways, prosecuting individual cases doesn't seem like a particularly good way of evaluating the effectiveness of an agency.
  - dnautics 6y ago
    Well, it's pretty obvious that DARPA has different standards in different divisions (division I was in was relatively new), then. Which still makes me wonder wtf they are anymore.
    - throwawaygh 6y ago
      > division I was in was relatively new That makes sense.
- bitcharmer 6y ago
  What does PI mean in this context? I've worked in software projects for 20 years and not once have I stumbled upon the term.
  - jsizzle 6y ago
    Principal Investigator, basically the lead researcher
watwut 6y ago
It however matters quite a lot what it takes to removed them from such position and how often does that happen. It also depends whether there is a system that can identify such people people and minimize damage they cause. In this case apparently, it took a lot and there was no system.

dnautics 6y ago

Perhaps I have a flair for the dramatic, but consider my statement that I haven't met a competent pm in the division I was in (n~5). The incentives are not that well-aligned. Think about it this way. If you're really smart, why do you become a DARPA PM, and not a PI? Yes there are a few good reasons, but the population it applies to have largely been selected out by the postdoc phase (where I would say you have had sufficient experience with crushing scientific and engineering failure onself and watching others to be effective) and the pool of candidates therefore is vanishing.

throwawaygh 6y ago
> If you're really smart, why do you become a DARPA PM, and not a PI? Reasons are myriad. 100% of the PMs I've worked with had tenure and successful labs prior to becoming PMs, and went back to their institution & restarted their labs after leaving DARPA. The reason for leaving your lab to be PM is fairly obvious: controlling the funding gives you a lot of leverage for shaping the priorities of the field, in a way that merely running your own lab doesn't. Maybe your division sucked. I've only ever worked with highly competent PMs, and all of the programs I've worked on ended in commercialization. Anyways, prosecuting individual cases doesn't seem like a particularly good way of evaluating the effectiveness of an agency.
- dnautics 6y ago
  Well, it's pretty obvious that DARPA has different standards in different divisions (division I was in was relatively new), then. Which still makes me wonder wtf they are anymore.
  - throwawaygh 6y ago
    > division I was in was relatively new That makes sense.
bitcharmer 6y ago
What does PI mean in this context? I've worked in software projects for 20 years and not once have I stumbled upon the term.
- jsizzle 6y ago
  Principal Investigator, basically the lead researcher

watwut 6y ago

It however matters quite a lot what it takes to removed them from such position and how often does that happen. It also depends whether there is a system that can identify such people people and minimize damage they cause. In this case apparently, it took a lot and there was no system.