indigent · HackerTrans

13 lat temudiscuss

Another important aspect about retaining good employees is to help them through their failures. The longer an employee stays at a company, the more likely it is that they will screw up. No one has a 100% track record. Good management teams recognize this, and should have plans to guide faltering employees back on the right track.

indigent

13 lat temudiscuss

I feel slightly validated for leaving academia after reading this article. When I was in grad school I was working with an adviser who was in the final phase of applying for tenure. She was under immense pressure to publish, and she totally passed all that pressure on to me and her other grad student at the time. It was the worst two years of my life. Ultimately we both left her charge, and she was denied tenure.

The "publish or perish" atmosphere at most institutions is toxic. I remember running some in-vivo experiments using our system and looking for data that validated our hypothesis, but when I found none I was ordered to "find anything" and rewrite the hypothesis to match it. This was so that we had something positive to submit to journals, regardless of what it was. The papers were utter trash, and I was ashamed to put my name on them. The absolute focus on publishing ends up creating what is essentially "journal spam."

I don't want to say that research is dead, but it's definitely in the doldrums at this point.

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