Yeah, while I can relate to her plight, its pretty much the same situation when you do research in the industry and you want to get ahead in your career. Some things are different, but politics are still politics.
Whenever you have more than one person at a time in an environment, you have politics of some form or another.
People who proclaim how much interpersonal politics bothers them will have a much harder time getting ahead because you don’t get out of the political game unless you’re willing to compromise on a lot of things we work for.
But it doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing game, just getting a LITTLE more comfortable talking and socializing can have massive benefits to your professional life.
Completely ignoring qualification altogether in favor of nepotistic back scratching is actually not just being a member of society. IMO, HR should hide the identifying information of candidates from people making the hiring decisions so all they’ve got is the qualifications on the resume to judge them by.
IMO, HR should hide the identifying information of candidates from people making the hiring decisions
That would shift towards another metric of whose resumes look the best. That might be an improvement, but we’d still be talking about how much bullshit there is in making your resume perfectly tailored to a particular opportunity. And at that point we’re still talking about the skills that go into a grant application or a submission of a paper to a conference. That’s the soft skills that make science possible, even if submissions are anonymized.
That’s just not how the world works though… you will have to work with at least 1 person at a job (your boss), so you should be able to work well with at least 1 person. That doesn’t come through with just a resume.
You’re getting downvoted because a large number of people who spend their weekdays voting on internet comments are not working.
Working is easy. Maintaining a predictable and comfortable work environment for a team of people also trying to get through their day while meeting larger goals for the company is very, very hard. The interview process is where the actual decisions are made by managers like myself, because I am responsible for a dozen people’s lives and workdays, I have to make sure anyone I add to their daily necessary interactions isn’t going to be a massive piece of shit who will disrupt everything.
I will always choose lower qualified people with better attitudes than people with sparkling resumes who seem “off” or like they’re going to be a problem.
I fully expect to also get reamed in the voting process here, but if you feel the need to attack this basic fact of life that the needs of the existing and working team outweigh your unique personality and identity, you’re exactly the kind of person I screen out at hiring interviews.
I appreciate the sentiment but no - in the case of hard science it shouldn’t be.
Yes, BS exists everywhere, yes we all have to do it, yes yes yes but this is science. Only facts should matter, only agreed truth should be the topic the rest of it is very obviously poisoning the entirety of the effort to understand our world.
Saying “so what we all have to deal with it” is not the point. If you’re talking about seminary, that’s maybe closer(?) to the gist than, say, marketing. Or if you’re a systems analyst for the USPS it’s similar maybe. But people out in the world doing non-scientific things have already agreed long ago that it doesn’t really matter what they find or how they find it (so long as it leads to more money, the only source of “truth”) - science does not.
All the bullshit and pointless politics and ladders and so on she’s talking about in the quote are just ways to say “money” (or “power”) for science which is an anathema.
Only facts should matter, only agreed truth should be the topic the rest of it is very obviously poisoning the entirety of the effort to understand our world.
I don’t understand how you’d prioritize things using only facts, and not some kind of extrinsic value system that assigns weights to those facts.
Let’s say you have a huge infrared telescope sitting at a Lagrange point, between the earth and the sun. How would you determine what it should be observing at any given time? There’s only 8760 hours in a year, and the telescope was designed to last for 5 years, with the hope of 10 years. How do you divide up that finite resource?
Now do the same for every particle collider, double blind medical study, paleontological excavation, test nuclear reactor, etc., fighting for a finite amount of science money, and you’ll have no choice but to define priorities according to projections and uncertainties and value judgments.
That just what being a member of society is, lots of overhead.
Autistic people often face these challenges even outside of science.
Yeah, while I can relate to her plight, its pretty much the same situation when you do research in the industry and you want to get ahead in your career. Some things are different, but politics are still politics.
Whenever you have more than one person at a time in an environment, you have politics of some form or another.
People who proclaim how much interpersonal politics bothers them will have a much harder time getting ahead because you don’t get out of the political game unless you’re willing to compromise on a lot of things we work for.
But it doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing game, just getting a LITTLE more comfortable talking and socializing can have massive benefits to your professional life.
Completely ignoring qualification altogether in favor of nepotistic back scratching is actually not just being a member of society. IMO, HR should hide the identifying information of candidates from people making the hiring decisions so all they’ve got is the qualifications on the resume to judge them by.
That would shift towards another metric of whose resumes look the best. That might be an improvement, but we’d still be talking about how much bullshit there is in making your resume perfectly tailored to a particular opportunity. And at that point we’re still talking about the skills that go into a grant application or a submission of a paper to a conference. That’s the soft skills that make science possible, even if submissions are anonymized.
That’s just not how the world works though… you will have to work with at least 1 person at a job (your boss), so you should be able to work well with at least 1 person. That doesn’t come through with just a resume.
You’re getting downvoted because a large number of people who spend their weekdays voting on internet comments are not working.
Working is easy. Maintaining a predictable and comfortable work environment for a team of people also trying to get through their day while meeting larger goals for the company is very, very hard. The interview process is where the actual decisions are made by managers like myself, because I am responsible for a dozen people’s lives and workdays, I have to make sure anyone I add to their daily necessary interactions isn’t going to be a massive piece of shit who will disrupt everything.
I will always choose lower qualified people with better attitudes than people with sparkling resumes who seem “off” or like they’re going to be a problem.
I fully expect to also get reamed in the voting process here, but if you feel the need to attack this basic fact of life that the needs of the existing and working team outweigh your unique personality and identity, you’re exactly the kind of person I screen out at hiring interviews.
I appreciate the sentiment but no - in the case of hard science it shouldn’t be.
Yes, BS exists everywhere, yes we all have to do it, yes yes yes but this is science. Only facts should matter, only agreed truth should be the topic the rest of it is very obviously poisoning the entirety of the effort to understand our world.
Saying “so what we all have to deal with it” is not the point. If you’re talking about seminary, that’s maybe closer(?) to the gist than, say, marketing. Or if you’re a systems analyst for the USPS it’s similar maybe. But people out in the world doing non-scientific things have already agreed long ago that it doesn’t really matter what they find or how they find it (so long as it leads to more money, the only source of “truth”) - science does not.
All the bullshit and pointless politics and ladders and so on she’s talking about in the quote are just ways to say “money” (or “power”) for science which is an anathema.
And in the social sciences, we’re really fucked.
I don’t understand how you’d prioritize things using only facts, and not some kind of extrinsic value system that assigns weights to those facts.
Let’s say you have a huge infrared telescope sitting at a Lagrange point, between the earth and the sun. How would you determine what it should be observing at any given time? There’s only 8760 hours in a year, and the telescope was designed to last for 5 years, with the hope of 10 years. How do you divide up that finite resource?
Now do the same for every particle collider, double blind medical study, paleontological excavation, test nuclear reactor, etc., fighting for a finite amount of science money, and you’ll have no choice but to define priorities according to projections and uncertainties and value judgments.