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The worst consequence of this insecure, anxious, hypercompetitive culture is the near-impossibility of sincere collaboration. I speak from my experience as a v

The worst consequence of this insecure, anxious, hypercompetitive culture is the near-impossibility of sincere collaboration. I speak from my experience as a very successful grad-student and postdoc in synthetic biology and neuroscience. Unlike equity in a startup, the kudos credit for publishing a high-impact paper is really only split between the first author and the lab PI, removing any incentive for trainees and labs to work together on larger projects. Of course, a great deal of noise is made in grants and PR about academic collaborations, but they are always paper affairs of convenience in securing funding, never truly incentivized joint missions, at least not in the biological sciences. I can't count the number of attempted collaborations that I've seen collapse in heated acrimony. As a result, most academic science is a very lonely affair, and the ambition of what can be achieved today in experimental biology is completely constrained by what one poorly-trained young researcher can do in a few years of hard labor with only a modicum of outside help and advice.

tjradcliffe 12y ago
This is one of the things that struck me most about moving out of academia and into various other things: how collegial in the best sense of the word most of the engineering teams I've worked on have been. In academia, if you're any good, you're a threat to other good people. You try to be nice to each other, but when it's you and a few dozen of your closest colleagues in pursuit of the one or two tenure-track openings in your field this decade... there are limits on how collaborative you can be. In the business world, if you're any good, you're a resource and people want to work with you. It's pretty awesome, actually, although there are obviously bad situations as well. They're just fewer and further between.
- NotOscarWilde 12y ago
  > In academia, if you're any good, you're a threat to other good people. You try to be nice to each other, but when it's you and a few dozen of your closest colleagues in pursuit of the one or two tenure-track openings in your field this decade... there are limits on how collaborative you can be. There are many "academias", but this is not my personal experience of it. Yes, I think most of us PhDs realize the bleak situation we are in, but still, we usually work together at the university as well as across universities. Whenever I see a PhD student that has a better track record or just more talent, I am very happy for him -- after all, he's got a bigger chance than me for making it in academia. There might be some politics and bickering among researchers/employees within a university, but that's something that happens in every community.
- cfallin 12y ago
  > In academia, if you're any good, you're a threat to other good people This may be the case for career academics (professors), but in my experience, as a PhD student, at least in a day-to-day setting my fellow students were remarkably friendly and collaborative. The camaraderie within my advisor's group and within the dept as a whole was great; we were always happy to bounce ideas off of each other, always friendly and encouraging, mostly constructive in criticism, and it was generally pretty productive. I think this type of rivalry comes out much more between different research groups at different schools. I can recall a number of times we thought some other group's paper was full of crap, and asked questions as such (usually politely) after the conference talk. But that mostly comes from a tradition of academic debate, not a 'shoot down everyone else so I can win' attitude. I didn't stay for the "go on the job talk circuit and fight for a tenure-track slot" stage (actually I left before the "defend and graduate" stage, oh well), so maybe I'm just pleasantly lacking the visceral experience of that part...
analog31 12y ago
I wonder if it's fair to generalize academia as a classic zero-sum game. Funding is, after all, limited by some mechanism analogous to central planning.

tjradcliffe 12y ago

This is one of the things that struck me most about moving out of academia and into various other things: how collegial in the best sense of the word most of the engineering teams I've worked on have been. In academia, if you're any good, you're a threat to other good people. You try to be nice to each other, but when it's you and a few dozen of your closest colleagues in pursuit of the one or two tenure-track openings in your field this decade... there are limits on how collaborative you can be. In the business world, if you're any good, you're a resource and people want to work with you. It's pretty awesome, actually, although there are obviously bad situations as well. They're just fewer and further between.

NotOscarWilde 12y ago
> In academia, if you're any good, you're a threat to other good people. You try to be nice to each other, but when it's you and a few dozen of your closest colleagues in pursuit of the one or two tenure-track openings in your field this decade... there are limits on how collaborative you can be. There are many "academias", but this is not my personal experience of it. Yes, I think most of us PhDs realize the bleak situation we are in, but still, we usually work together at the university as well as across universities. Whenever I see a PhD student that has a better track record or just more talent, I am very happy for him -- after all, he's got a bigger chance than me for making it in academia. There might be some politics and bickering among researchers/employees within a university, but that's something that happens in every community.
cfallin 12y ago
> In academia, if you're any good, you're a threat to other good people This may be the case for career academics (professors), but in my experience, as a PhD student, at least in a day-to-day setting my fellow students were remarkably friendly and collaborative. The camaraderie within my advisor's group and within the dept as a whole was great; we were always happy to bounce ideas off of each other, always friendly and encouraging, mostly constructive in criticism, and it was generally pretty productive. I think this type of rivalry comes out much more between different research groups at different schools. I can recall a number of times we thought some other group's paper was full of crap, and asked questions as such (usually politely) after the conference talk. But that mostly comes from a tradition of academic debate, not a 'shoot down everyone else so I can win' attitude. I didn't stay for the "go on the job talk circuit and fight for a tenure-track slot" stage (actually I left before the "defend and graduate" stage, oh well), so maybe I'm just pleasantly lacking the visceral experience of that part...

analog31 12y ago

I wonder if it's fair to generalize academia as a classic zero-sum game. Funding is, after all, limited by some mechanism analogous to central planning.