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Science needs more "technicians" of all types, and less PhD students. Good luck making that transformation though.

by dbcooper 4y ago

zmgsabst 4y ago
Could you elaborate on what that would look like?
- l33t2328 4y ago
  I think they’re describing professional grad students.
raister 4y ago
> Less PhD students PhD students are the backbone of any research project. They interact with postdocs and with undergrads in the research ecossystem. If anything, they will be required more in the years to come, not less.
- dguest 4y ago
  It depends on the amount of technical debt in the project. When there's no technical debt, sure, grad students are the backbone. They can happily go about their projects and supervise undergrads, while the postdocs supervise them and apply for jobs. In a place where there's a lot of technical debt, a postdoc is going to be far more productive than a grad student. In some experiments many grad students spend years floundering around before they learn enough to cut through the cruft and do real research. It's pretty silly to fire all the postdocs just when they've managed to understand everything and replace them with new grad students. The tricky thing is keeping enough of the technical staff around, and coming up with a system where they are rewarded for eliminating debt, rather than penalized for making their own hard-earned skills obsolete.
Mountain_Skies 4y ago
SOX for the head of research. There are minimal consequences for producing poor quality software that creates erroneous results and often quite a few incentives for producing inaccurate results that can be blamed on a non-human entity (the software). Even SOX with an escape clause for "good faith effort" would be a game changer since what goes on now would never be considered a good faith effort by any court. SOX hasn't been anywhere near as successful at modifying behavior as it should have been but it still has caused a good bit of change and those at the top setting priorities and incentives for those below them to align with now know there's a possibility of some hefty consequences for reckless or negligent behavior.

Science needs more "technicians" of all types, and less PhD students. Good luck making that transformation though.

zmgsabst 4y ago

Could you elaborate on what that would look like?

l33t2328 4y ago
I think they’re describing professional grad students.

raister 4y ago

> Less PhD students PhD students are the backbone of any research project. They interact with postdocs and with undergrads in the research ecossystem. If anything, they will be required more in the years to come, not less.

dguest 4y ago
It depends on the amount of technical debt in the project. When there's no technical debt, sure, grad students are the backbone. They can happily go about their projects and supervise undergrads, while the postdocs supervise them and apply for jobs. In a place where there's a lot of technical debt, a postdoc is going to be far more productive than a grad student. In some experiments many grad students spend years floundering around before they learn enough to cut through the cruft and do real research. It's pretty silly to fire all the postdocs just when they've managed to understand everything and replace them with new grad students. The tricky thing is keeping enough of the technical staff around, and coming up with a system where they are rewarded for eliminating debt, rather than penalized for making their own hard-earned skills obsolete.

Mountain_Skies 4y ago

SOX for the head of research. There are minimal consequences for producing poor quality software that creates erroneous results and often quite a few incentives for producing inaccurate results that can be blamed on a non-human entity (the software). Even SOX with an escape clause for "good faith effort" would be a game changer since what goes on now would never be considered a good faith effort by any court. SOX hasn't been anywhere near as successful at modifying behavior as it should have been but it still has caused a good bit of change and those at the top setting priorities and incentives for those below them to align with now know there's a possibility of some hefty consequences for reckless or negligent behavior.