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Honest question: as a person in-between academia and industry (sorry, I stalked you a little bit), what are your views on the percentage of actual, hands-on wor

Honest question: as a person in-between academia and industry (sorry, I stalked you a little bit), what are your views on the percentage of actual, hands-on work happening in those 36.5 hours? I have a theory that in Sweden you must divide your work into 80/20: 80% self-advertising (bragging in meetings, etc.) and 20% actual work. Anything more and you’re wasting your time and losing the race.

anticristi 3y ago
I'm at the seniority in my career where I still find stalking flattering. :))) I think in every job you need to (a) do good work, (b) make that work visible. So at least some amount of self-advertisement is good both for the individual and the organization. You would wonder how much time I spend on "stalking" engineers and making their amazing work more visible towards our customers -- giving proper credit during our biweekly demos, of course. Unfortunately, above a certain threshold (say about 20% of your time), self-advertisement is toxic. As far as I could notice, this happens in environments where people feel unsafe. This can happen both in industry and academia. However, you might be right that self-advertisement is more present in academia, given the tendance to assess individuals over teams and given the overall "squeeze". :) Would you agree?
- low_tech_love 3y ago
  I never worked in the industry, so unfortunately I don’t have a basis for comparison. But in our case (academia in Sweden) I’d say it is certainly not because of lack of safety. If anything, one of my assumptions is that it’s actually the opposite. Since we’re not being judged by merit (at least not in any significance way for better or worse), and there is no easy way to get paid more for extra time or better outcomes, people will inflate their mediocre results to find a way to work less with the same pay.
  - anticristi 3y ago
    Interesting hypothesis. I think your hypothesis has some merits. The way salary increases work in Swedish academia is that the union negotiates an average increase over the whole university -- say 2.5%. Then the department head will give some below the average and some above the average. So it's up to you to be "the loudest in the department" to get an above-average increase. Not saying how things should be, just saying how things are.
ChuckNorris89 3y ago
>I have a theory that in Sweden you must divide your work into 80/20: 80% self-advertising (bragging in meetings, etc.) and 20% actual work Doesn't that depend more on company, size and industry than on country? In big and inefficient companies everyone dedicates most of their time to visibility to the upper echelons, instead of actual work, as that's what gets you promoted. You loose a lot if you're the one actually doing the work, but none of the bigshots above you knows about it. You might even get laid off lol, I've seen it. In small companies your productivity is more easily seen by those in charge of your paycheck so you can dedicate most of your time to that as you know that will be rewarded
- low_tech_love 3y ago
  Could be. Actually I could argue that Sweden is just one big inefficient company. :) But I’ve worked in a couple of other countries and Sweden is by far the worst in this aspect. Competition and merits mean very little here because jobs are extremely safe (once you get one), salaries differ very little, and even when you’re not working you get so many benefits many people don’t even care too much. So, what happens is that the system optimises not for those who actually get things done, because that doesn’t matter too much, but for those who know how to build an interesting, believable façade. Let me exemplify with a common interaction from my daily work. Suppose I’m working on a project proposal. Before I do anything, I need to have a meeting with 5 different people from various administrative positions in order to make sure they “allow” me to write my proposal (i.e. if it aligns with the institution’s goals, if it meets all the hundreds of rules that are in place at any given time, if there are other people that “should” be involved, etc.) After that 1h meeting, they’ll all say “ok, great! We’ve done our job. No go and invest the 50h needed to write the proposal, and don’t forget to include our names in it because we’ve helped you so much. This is your part of the job!” So I go and write the goddamned thing and put everyone’s names in it. Then the project gets accepted, these 5 people are posting this thing everywhere, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. as if they actually had anything to do with its content. They get promoted, invited for committees, and the whole shebang. Now don’t get me wrong, I also get recognition, but my salary is almost the same as theirs. Sometimes smaller. And because it’s so obvious they got a lot of rewards with very little work, it just makes more and more people seek administrative jobs and less seek jobs where you actually get shit done. I understand; why would you care? If I was born here I sure as hell wouldn’t. Edit: I realize maybe “very little” work is misleading. Maybe they are doing the same thing many times a day. But it’s for absolutely sure much “easier” work than actually getting the research done. It’s the kind of work that you can completely turn off at the end of the day or weekend, for example.

anticristi 3y ago

I'm at the seniority in my career where I still find stalking flattering. :))) I think in every job you need to (a) do good work, (b) make that work visible. So at least some amount of self-advertisement is good both for the individual and the organization. You would wonder how much time I spend on "stalking" engineers and making their amazing work more visible towards our customers -- giving proper credit during our biweekly demos, of course. Unfortunately, above a certain threshold (say about 20% of your time), self-advertisement is toxic. As far as I could notice, this happens in environments where people feel unsafe. This can happen both in industry and academia. However, you might be right that self-advertisement is more present in academia, given the tendance to assess individuals over teams and given the overall "squeeze". :) Would you agree?

low_tech_love 3y ago
I never worked in the industry, so unfortunately I don’t have a basis for comparison. But in our case (academia in Sweden) I’d say it is certainly not because of lack of safety. If anything, one of my assumptions is that it’s actually the opposite. Since we’re not being judged by merit (at least not in any significance way for better or worse), and there is no easy way to get paid more for extra time or better outcomes, people will inflate their mediocre results to find a way to work less with the same pay.
- anticristi 3y ago
  Interesting hypothesis. I think your hypothesis has some merits. The way salary increases work in Swedish academia is that the union negotiates an average increase over the whole university -- say 2.5%. Then the department head will give some below the average and some above the average. So it's up to you to be "the loudest in the department" to get an above-average increase. Not saying how things should be, just saying how things are.

ChuckNorris89 3y ago

>I have a theory that in Sweden you must divide your work into 80/20: 80% self-advertising (bragging in meetings, etc.) and 20% actual work Doesn't that depend more on company, size and industry than on country? In big and inefficient companies everyone dedicates most of their time to visibility to the upper echelons, instead of actual work, as that's what gets you promoted. You loose a lot if you're the one actually doing the work, but none of the bigshots above you knows about it. You might even get laid off lol, I've seen it. In small companies your productivity is more easily seen by those in charge of your paycheck so you can dedicate most of your time to that as you know that will be rewarded

low_tech_love 3y ago
Could be. Actually I could argue that Sweden is just one big inefficient company. :) But I’ve worked in a couple of other countries and Sweden is by far the worst in this aspect. Competition and merits mean very little here because jobs are extremely safe (once you get one), salaries differ very little, and even when you’re not working you get so many benefits many people don’t even care too much. So, what happens is that the system optimises not for those who actually get things done, because that doesn’t matter too much, but for those who know how to build an interesting, believable façade. Let me exemplify with a common interaction from my daily work. Suppose I’m working on a project proposal. Before I do anything, I need to have a meeting with 5 different people from various administrative positions in order to make sure they “allow” me to write my proposal (i.e. if it aligns with the institution’s goals, if it meets all the hundreds of rules that are in place at any given time, if there are other people that “should” be involved, etc.) After that 1h meeting, they’ll all say “ok, great! We’ve done our job. No go and invest the 50h needed to write the proposal, and don’t forget to include our names in it because we’ve helped you so much. This is your part of the job!” So I go and write the goddamned thing and put everyone’s names in it. Then the project gets accepted, these 5 people are posting this thing everywhere, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. as if they actually had anything to do with its content. They get promoted, invited for committees, and the whole shebang. Now don’t get me wrong, I also get recognition, but my salary is almost the same as theirs. Sometimes smaller. And because it’s so obvious they got a lot of rewards with very little work, it just makes more and more people seek administrative jobs and less seek jobs where you actually get shit done. I understand; why would you care? If I was born here I sure as hell wouldn’t. Edit: I realize maybe “very little” work is misleading. Maybe they are doing the same thing many times a day. But it’s for absolutely sure much “easier” work than actually getting the research done. It’s the kind of work that you can completely turn off at the end of the day or weekend, for example.